Layered Adaptive Modulation and Coding for 4G Wireless Networks

Emerging 4G standards, such as WiMAX, LTE, and TD-SCDMA, 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. To mitigate the vicious effects due to stale channel state indication (CSI) problem, this paper introduces a novel framework by incorporating AMC with layered transmission through Superposition Coding (SPC). A Markov chain model is adopted under this framework, to effectively assist the system in selecting the optimal modulation and coding scheme for each layer in every multi-resolution unicast transmission. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the proposed framework and compare it with a number of counterparts. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework can achieve a much better spectrum efficiency due to improved robustness by addressing the stale CSI problem at each multi-resolution modulated transmission.