On the Spectral Efficiency of Rate and Subcarrier Bandwidth Adaptive OFDM Systems Over Very Fast Fading Channels

In this paper, rate and subcarrier bandwidth adaptation (RSBA) on the average spectral efficiency of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) is investigated in the presence of frequency-selective and very rapidly time-varying fading channels. The closed-form expressions for rate and capacity with perfect channel state information (CSI) and imperfect CSI are derived. In this paper, imperfect CSI is caused jointly by channel estimation error and unavoidable delay between when CSI is estimated and when the estimation results are used for actual transmission. The capacity with perfect CSI is just a special case of imperfect CSI. Based on the closed-form expressions of the maximum capacity, optimal RSBA algorithms with perfect and imperfect CSI are proposed, respectively. Theoretical and numerical results show that the RSBA scheme can improve the system performance effectively under the perfect-CSI case. It can make a tradeoff between intercarrier interference (ICI) and transmission efficiency by considering the cyclic prefix. The results also show that the RSBA scheme is effective in repelling the impact of outdated CSI, as well as in reducing the impact of channel estimation error, but to a lesser extent.