Abstract
A great deal of attention has been devoted in the recent literature to the study of the bit-error rate (BER) performance of phase-shift keyed (PSK) constellations, due to their high spectral efficiency. It is well known that an error in phase or timing synchronization affects the probability of correct decisions at the receiver. This problem becomes much more significant as data rates increase, and the corresponding symbol durations decrease. In this letter, we look into this problem and analyze the exact BER performance of generalized hierarchical PSK constellations under imperfect phase or timing synchronization over additive white Gaussian noise channels.