Phase-shift Keying - Higher-order PSK

Higher-order PSK

Any number of phases may be used to construct a PSK constellation but 8-PSK is usually the highest order PSK constellation deployed. With more than 8 phases, the error-rate becomes too high and there are better, though more complex, modulations available such as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Although any number of phases may be used, the fact that the constellation must usually deal with binary data means that the number of symbols is usually a power of 2 — this allows an equal number of bits-per-symbol.