Layered Adaptive Modulation and Coding For 4G Wireless Networks

Abstract

Emerging 4G standards, such as WiMAX and LTE have adopted the proven technique of Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) to dynamically react to channel fluctuations while maintaining bit-error rate targets of the transmission. This scheme makes use of the estimated channel state indication (CSI) to efficiently utilize channel capacity for next transmission, but it brings with it the stale CSI problem due to the frequently channel fluctuations. As its objective, this thesis focuses on mitigating the vicious effect of stale CSI by proposing a novel framework that incorporate AMC with layered transmission through Superposition Coding (SPC) is introduced. A layered multi-step finite-state Markov chain model (FSMC) is developed under this framework, to effectively assist the system in selecting the optimal modulation and coding scheme as well as the power allocated for each layer in every multi-resolution unicast transmission. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the proposed framework and compare its performance with other counterparts. The effects of changing key parameters, such as the complexity factor and step size, are also investigated to get close to real world performance. Results demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve better spectrum efficiency than similar counterparts, due to its improved robustness to the stale CSI problem for each multi-resolution modulated transmission, also these show that the performance of two-layer scheme is good enough for layer allocation, without need of more layers.