The emerging fifth generation (5G) wireless access network, aiming at providing ubiquitous and high data rate connectivity, is envisaged to deploy large number of base stations with higher density and smaller sizes, where inter-cell interference (ICI) becomes a critical problem. Frequency quadrature amplitude modulation (FQAM) has been shown to reduce the ICI at the cell edge therefore achieve a higher transmission rate for cell edge users. This paper investigates the detection of FQAM symbols

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... nd noise plus ICI in a multi-cell FQAM communication network. Turbo-coded bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) of multi-cell FQAM are studied. Also, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of signal to noise plus interference (SINR) of multi-cell FQAM is computed using stochastic geometry. It is demonstrated via simulations FQAM outperforms quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in BER and FER when ICI is significant. Furthermore, FQAM can achieve better SINR than QAM.