An Adaptive Modulation Selection Scheme Based on Error Estimating Coding

Adaptive modulation selection plays an important role in wireless communication and wireless sensor network since the wireless channel condition is time-varying due to some factors e.g. path-loss and multipath propagation. Therefore, using one modulation type cannot fulfill all the channel conditions and receivers. Conventional adaptive modulation selection schemes are based on packet loss statistics or SNR measurement. However, all of these methods are indirect approaches because they utilize the packet loss rate or SNR information to estimate the BER approximately and the modulation selection that based on these approximate results is not exactly. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to utilize the error estimating code (EEC) which directly represents the BER information to realize a new adaptive modulation selection scheme. Compared to traditional adaptive modulation type selection schemes, our scheme needs only a small amount of overhead and very little computational cost for the same performance.