Increasing Throughput in Wireless Communications by Grouping Similar Quality Bits

This letter proposes and studies a technique for grouping the bits transmitted through a wireless channel into codewords according to their quality (SNR). It proves that splitting the bits into multiple codewords of different rates provides a higher throughput than mixing heterogeneous quality bits into fixed-rate codewords. The letter first analyzes the pros and cons of different mappings of bits and codewords to the available time, frequency, and modulation resources. Then it describes the proposed scheme for a 16-QAM modulation and illustrates its benefits through simulations. Finally, it provides a mathematical proof of its superiority in a binary-input parallel AWGN channel with finite length error correcting codes. The proposed scheme can be applied to any communications channel using error correcting codes (ECC), but it is of particular interest for millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless communications, where the channel quality is closely monitored and high order modulations are used over wide bandwidths. The simulations suggest that modest gains in throughput can be obtained with negligible additional complexity.