Adaptive modulation systems for predicted wireless channels

When adaptive modulation is used to counter short-term fading in mobile radio channels, signaling delays create problems with outdated channel state information. The use of channel power prediction improves the performance of the link adaptation. It is then of interest to take the quality of these predictions into account explicitly when designing an adaptive modulation scheme. We study the optimum design of an adaptive modulation scheme based on uncoded M-QAM modulation assisted by channel prediction for the flat Rayleigh fading channel. The data rate, and in some variants the transmit power, are adapted to maximize the spectral efficiency subject to average power and bit error rate constraints. The key issues studied here are how a known prediction error variance affects the optimized transmission properties such as the SNR boundaries that determine when to apply different modulation rates, and to what extent it affects the spectral efficiency. This investigation is performed by analytical optimization of the link adaptation, using the statistical properties of a particular but efficient channel power predictor. Optimum solutions for the rate and transmit power are derived based on the predicted SNR and the prediction error variance.