Effect of power and rate adaptation on the spectral efficiency of MQAM/OFDM system under very fast fading channels

In this article, the effect of power and rate adaptation on the spectral efficiency of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) is investigated in the presence of frequency selective and very rapidly time-varying fading channels, under power and instantaneous bit error rate (BER) constraints. Lower bounds on the maximum spectral efficiency of adaptive OFDM/MQAM systems with perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) are obtained, together with a closed-form expression for the average spectral efficiency of adaptive OFDM systems. The delay between the channel estimation and the actual transmission is also considered in this article. The theoretical and numerical results show that the adaptive MQAM/OFDM systems under fast fading channels have substantial gains in spectral efficiency over the non-adaptive counterparts with perfect CSI or moderate imperfect CSI. The theoretical and numerical results also show that a good way to deal with the delay CSI under very rapidly time-varying channels is to increase the subcarrier bandwidth of the OFDM system while ignoring the impact of the cyclic prefix.