On the Effect of Compactness of Pulse Shaping Function on Inter-Symbol Interference

Abstract

In this letter we theoretically and numerically investigate the effectiveness of a compact pulse in terms of producing less inter-symbol interference (ISI) and thus less symbol error rate (SER). We present theoretical equations to express the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) for different levels of ISI as well as theoretical SER in terms of quantified compactness of the pulse. In a single compact form equation, we expressed the relationship that connects all the aforementioned terms with each other and with the spectral efficiency. A well-studied ‘better-than-raised cosine’ (BTRC) pulse shape in quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is considered and the performance are compared with standard pulses such as Gaussian and raised cosine pulse shapes. Performance comparison results are presented showing that the BTRC pulse outperforms the conventional pulses in both SNIR and SER metrics.