Upper-bound performance of a wideband burst-by-burst adaptive modem

In this article, adaptive modulation is applied in conjunction with a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) in order to mitigate the effects of the slowly varying wideband multipath Rayleigh fading channel. The upper-bound mean BER and bits per symbol (BPS) performance of this scheme is determined by utilizing the pseudo-SNR at the output of the DFE, in order to switch the modulation schemes on a burst-by-burst basis. The performances of each individual modulation scheme and their amalgamated adaptive scheme were compared in terms of the information throughput for a low- and a high-BER arrangement. The results indicate both SNR gains of approximately 1-3 dB and 7-9 dB, for the high- and low-BER arrangement, respectively using the proposed burst-by-burst adaptive wideband scheme in a noise limited environment.