Amplitude and phase-shift keying
Amplitude and phase-shift keying or asymmetric phase-shift keying is a digital modulation scheme that conveys data by changing, or modulating, both the amplitude and the phase of a reference signal. In other words, it combines both amplitude-shift keying and phase-shift keying to increase the symbol-set. It can be considered as a superclass of quadrature amplitude modulation. The advantage over conventional QAM, for example 16-QAM, is lower number of possible amplitude levels.
Moreover, a careful design of the constellation geometry can approach the Gaussian capacity as the constellation size grows to infinity. For the regular QAM constellations, a gap of 1.56 dB is observed. The previous solution, where the constellation has a Gaussian shape, is called constellation shaping.
