On the performance of slow adaptive M-QAM with antenna subset diversity in fading channels

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of adaptive M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation with antenna subset diversity. We consider a slow adaptive modulation (SAM) technique which adapts the constellation size to the slow variation of the channel due, for example, to shadowing. Our results show that the SAM technique can provide substantial increase in throughput with respect to fixed schemes while maintaining an acceptable low bit error outage. We also compare SAM with a fast adaptive modulation (FAM) technique, which tracks fast fading variations, showing that the throughput of SAM is close to that of FAM despite the fact that SAM is less complex and requires a lower feedback rate to the transmitter.