Low-power minimum estimation and combining with adaptive modulation

Traditional fading mitigation techniques are designed relative to the worst-case channel conditions, resulting in a poor utilization of the spectrum and the available power a good percentage of the time. In contrast, we introduce and investigate in this paper new adaptive modulation and diversity combining techniques that jointly select the most appropriate constellation size and the most suitable diversity branches in response to the channel variation and given a desired bit error rate (BER) requirement. Numerical results show that these newly proposed adaptive modulation and combining schemes can reduce considerably the average receiver channel estimation complexity as well as the power drain from the battery while offering high spectral efficiency and satisfying the desired outage probability and BER requirements.