Performance of Adaptive Modulation in alpha-mu fading channel under selection combining diversity

Adaptive Modulation and Diversity technique have been providing high efficiency and quality of service for different applications in wireless communications. Both methods aim to enhance the channel capacity compared to fixed transmission method. Alpha-Mu fading channel covers different fading channels in wireless communications to study the bit error rate or spectral efficiency. In this paper, the use of adaptive transmission with SC diversity is implemented under alpha-mu fading channel. Two different options were presented. The first option deals with the transmission of the data without taking target bit error rate into account, where no transmission under this option, which is good for low data rate services. Buffering the data in bad channel condition and waiting for the next period to send the data is the main target of the second option. The target bit error rate will be considered. In each scenario, bit error rate and spectral efficiency are computed. Simulation results illustrated that the performance of α - μ fading channel can be presented to different fading models. The results show that Nakagami-m fading distribution outperforms the performance of both Rayleigh and Weibull distributions in terms of BER and SE under selection combining diversity.