1.

0 INTRODUCTION

With increasing demand for higher transmission capacity and bit rates, the combination of
amplitude and phase modulation in multilevel encoding, known as quadrature amplitude
modulation (QAM) has come into focus in digital communication. Quadrature amplitude modulation
(QAM) is both an analog and a digital modulation scheme. It conveys two analog message signals, or
two digital bit streams, by changing (modulating) the amplitudes of two carrier waves, using the
amplitude-shift keying(ASK) digital modulation scheme or amplitude modulation(AM) analog
modulation scheme. The two carrier waves of the same frequency, usually sinusoids, are out of
phase with each other by 90◦ and are thus called quadrature carriers or quadrature components.
The final waveform is a combination of both phase-shift keying(PSK) and amplitude-shift
keying(ASK).Arbitrarily high spectral efficiencies can be achieved with QAM by setting suitable
constellation size, limited only by the noise level and linearity of the communication channel. There
are two main types of QAM constellation square and cross type constellation. For 16-ary QAM, it is a
square type.

1.1 Digital Quadrature Amplitude Modulation ( QAM)

As in many digital modulation schemes, the constellation diagram is useful for QAM. Since in
digital communication systems, the data is usually binary, the number of points in the grid is
usually a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, …). Since QAM is usually square, some of these are rare-the
most common forms are 16-QAM, 64-QAM and 256-QAM. By moving to a higher-order
constellation, it is possible to transmit more bits per symbol. The first rectangular QAM
constellation usually encountered is 16-QAM, the constellation diagram for which is shown
here.

Constellation diagram for rectangular 16-QAM

 1.2 TRANSMITTER
The following picture shows the ideal structure of a QAM transmitter, with a carrier center
frequency and the frequency response of the transmitter's filter :

First the flow of bits to be transmitted is split into two equal parts: this process generates
two independent signals to be transmitted. They are encoded separately just like they were
in an amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulator. Then one channel (the one "in phase") is
multiplied by a cosine, while the other channel (in "quadrature") is multiplied by a sine. This
way there is a phase of 90° between them. They are simply added one to the other and sent
through the real channel.

1.3 RECEIVER
The receiver simply performs the inverse operation of the transmitter. Its ideal structure is
shown in the picture below with the receive filter's frequency response :

2.0 PROBLEM STATEMENT

3.0 OBJECTIVES
 To increase the efficiency of transmission by utilizing both amplitude and phase variations.
 To reduce and eliminating intermodulation interference caused by a continuous carrier near
the modulation sidebands.
 QAM enables data transmission at twice the rate of standard pulse amplitude
modulation(PAM)
4.0 SCOPE OF PROJECT
5.0 METHODOLOGY
6.0 REFERENCE