Symbol mapping diversity design for packet retransmissions through fading channels

We present a simple, but effective, method of enhancing and exploiting diversity from multiple packet transmissions in systems that employ nonbinary linear modulations such as PSK and QAM. This diversity improvement results from redesigning the symbol mapping for each packet transmission. Using a general framework for evaluating the upper bound of bit error rate (BER) with multiple transmissions, a criterion to obtain optimal symbol mappings is attained. The optimal adaptation scheme reduces to solving the well known quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Symbol mapping adaptation only requires a small increase in receiver complexity but provides very substantial BER gains when applied to flat-fading channels.