Impact analysis of AMC adjustment period in mobile satellite communications environment

Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) is one of the most promising techniques to cope with the dynamic fading of wireless channels, adopted by emerging standards such as LTE and WiMAX. In satellite communications, the upper bound of AMC adjustment period is determined by both long round-trip delay and different channel coherence time. In this paper, the impact of AMC adjustment period in mobile satellite communications environment is analyzed. The Lutz model is used to reflect the characteristics of satellite channel. Payoff function corresponding to Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) under different states of channel is defined and the probability calculation is used to help with the impact analysis. The simulation results show that with the application of AMC technique, the performance of mobile satellite communications system is improved. Moreover, if the AMC adjustment period is lengthened, the performance improvement will be less obvious.