Pilot Symbol Assisted Adaptive Modulation for OFDM Systems with Imperfect Channel State Information

Adaptive modulation exhibits the advantage of great spectral efficiency for high data rate wireless transmission, where the transmission power and rate of subchannels in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are matched to the channel state information (CSI). CSI can be acquired at the receiver by MMSE channel estimation based on pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM), which is a widely used technique, and fed back to the transmitter. While more accurate channel estimation will result in more reliable transmission, pilot symbols don´´t carry information and they impose an overhead on the system consuming power and bandwidth. An optimal adaptive PSAM scheme, that maximizes spectral efficiency by optimizing pilot power and spacing simultaneously is proposed. A rectangular pilot pattern is adopted to simplify the adaptive scheme.