Adaptive Modulation for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the promisingtechnologies to improve the spectral efficiency, enhance system capacity and mitigateinter-symbol interference in the wireless communication system. Adaptivemodulation (AM) with OFDM has been suggested as a bandwidth efficienttransmission technique in wireless fading environments. In this paper, adaptivemodulation techniques is used with OFDM system to improve the throughputperformance of the system using four modulation schemes BPSK, QPSK, 8QAM,and 16QAM. Two algorithms to estimate SNR are suggested. The first algorithm is toestimate the SNR for each OFDM symbol in the frame. The second algorithm is toestimate the channel SNR for each subcarrier in the OFDM symbol. The comparisonbetween the results of the two algorithms on the performances of BER andthroughput for OFDM system is shown. Furthermore, the effect of various types ofchannel equalization on performances of system will be determined. The obtainedresults show that a significant improvements in terms of bit error rate (BER) andthroughput can be achieved demonstrating the superiority of the adaptive modulationschemes compared to fixed transmission schemes.