Applications of Capacity Limits to Performance Analyses of Adaptive Transmission Protocols for Packet Radios

Analytical methods are provided for use in performance evaluations, tradeoff studies, and preliminary designs of adaptive modulation and coding protocols that obtain their control information from practical sources. Our approach employs capacity limits and Markov chain models of fading to give analytical results on the throughput achieved by adaptive transmission in packet radio systems. The analytical methods replace simulations of the modem, iterative decoder, and time-varying fading channel. The amount of processor time required for protocol performance evaluations is decreased by several orders of magnitude.