S. Chatterjee et al.

: Adaptive Modulation based MC-CDMA Systems for 4G Wireless Consumer Applications

995

Adaptive Modulation based MC-CDMA Systems for 4G Wireless

Consumer Applications
S. Chatterjee1, W.A.C. Fernando2, M.K. Wasantha1
Abstract Adaptive modulation based MC-CDMA
systems can play a vital role in future generation consumer
communication electronics. Adaptive modulation, combined
with MC-CDMA based transmission technology, is a
promising way to increase the data rate that can be reliably
transmitted over the wireless radio channels. For 4G wireless
networks, which demand very high data rate up to 100 Mbits/s
with the constraints limiting higher data rate being severe ISI
due to multipath and the limited spectrum, such kind of
adaptive modulation based multi-carrier systems applied to a
wide-area environment, can achieve very large average user
throughputs. In this paper, adaptive modulation based M-ary
PSK, M-ary QAM, M-ary CPM, M-ary MHPM and GMSK
systems applied to a Turbo coded MC-CDMA system in a
Rayleigh fast fading channel environment have been
investigated and the BER performance of all these digital
modulation techniques have been compared. Results of the
comparative study indicate that the continuous phase
modulation schemes like CPM, MHPM and GMSK gives
better performance as compared to PSK and QAM schemes.
At most of the time, the MHPM system outperforms both
GMSK and CPM. The PSK and QAM based systems perform
well till the number of users is around 10. As a whole, the
adaptive MHPM system is found to give the optimum
performance among the considered digital modulation
schemes for the MC-CDMA system in 4G environment.
Index Terms Adaptive Modulation, CDMA, Digital
Modulation, MC-CDMA, OFDM.
I.

INTRODUCTION

The demand for networked consumer systems and devices is

large and growing rapidly. At home, in a car or truck, at work
or at play, people want transparent internetworking for the
systems and devices that provide entertainment, information,
and communications. This internetworking should be ondemand, with whomever or whatever they want, regardless of
time or location. As a result, consumer networking is gaining
increasing attention from industry spawning a range of
dramatically different solutions including wireless, wireline,
and power line networked communications environments, each
with their own strength and special challenges to overcome.
This in turn has defined the scope of consumer networking, to
range from the body area networking and personal area
1

Telecommunications Program, School of Advanced Technologies, Asian

Institute of Technology, P.B.No. 4, Klong Luang, Pathumthani 12120,
Thailand.
2
Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, University of
Brunel, Kingston Lane, UXBRIDGE, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
Contributed Paper
Manuscript received June 12, 2003

networking to home networking and wide area networking. In

the not too distant future, we will see Ad hoc networking
augmented with sensors sharing networked knowledge that
enables devices and systems to seamlessly interact with
Internet and wide area wireless systems such as future 4G
networks.
The present third generation (3G) systems can provide a
maximum data rate of 2 Mbit/s for indoor environment which
is quite less than that needed for the currently evolving
multimedia applications requiring very high bandwidth with
mobility. This has led the researchers worldwide to the
evolution of the fourth generation (4G) systems that are
expected to provide a data rate ranging from 20 Mbit/s to 100
Mbit/s on the air interface. New broadcasting and data
applications such as pay-per-view, home shopping, electronic
commerce and online data delivery services are under
consideration or already set to start. Also with the explosive
growth of the Internet and its worldwide acceptance the
demand for higher data bandwidth with greater reliability has
been increasing.
The most important objectives of the 4G wireless systems
are to take care of the severe inter symbol interference (ISI)
resulting from the high data rates, and to utilize the available
limited bandwidth in a spectrally efficient manner. To achieve
these objectives, there are two principle contending
technologies,
viz.,
Orthogonal
Frequency
Division
Multiplexing (OFDM) and Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA). CDMA is a well-known standard and has been used
for several years. However, OFDM, a multi-carrier (MC)
technique, is relatively new. OFDM is represented as the
successor to frequency hopping and direct sequence CDMA. It
is also positioned as the technique of choice for next
generation wireless LANs and metropolitan networks. The
capability of OFDM to cancel multipath distortion in a
spectrally efficient manner without requiring multiple local
oscillators has won adherents in the IEEE 802.11a and 802.16
working groups [1]. Future 4G wireless systems, based on the
combination of multi-carrier (OFDM) and spread spectrum
(CDMA) technologies, popularly known as OFDM-CDMA (or
MC-CDMA), applied to a wide-area environment, can achieve
very large average user throughputs. To further enhance the
spectral efficiency of the systems, some form of adaptive
modulation is being proposed, for example [2, 3, 4]. The idea
is to adaptively change the digital modulation (mapping)
format depending upon the condition of the channel. A better

0098 3063/00 $10.00 2003 IEEE

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 49, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2003

channel condition would imply a higher order modulation

scheme and hence a higher spectral efficiency, whereas a poor
channel condition selects a lower order modulation scheme to
maintain the required bit error rate (BER).
Combination of Coded MC-CDMA with adaptive
modulation techniques for 4G consumer communication
transmissions are investigated in this paper. Adaptive
modulation based M-ary PSK, M-ary QAM, M-ary CPM, Mary MHPM and GMSK systems applied to a Turbo coded MCCDMA system in a Rayleigh fast fading channel environment
have been investigated and the BER performance of all these
digital modulation techniques have been compared.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II deals
with the basic concepts related to adaptive modulation and MCCDMA system. Section III describes the system model and the
various system specifications adopted for the simulations. This is
followed by the simulation results and discussion in section IV.
Finally, section V concludes the paper.
II. RELATED CONCEPTS

A. Adaptive Modulation
The high mobility of the subscribers, in wireless
communication systems, causes radio channels to vary rapidly
with time. Signals take different paths to reach their
destination and while doing so experience different speeds of
phase rotation caused by the Doppler spread. These result in
rapid variation of the radio channels [5]. These time varying
radio channels characterized by multi-path fading at times
have very good SNR and at times are worse. Using a fixed
modulation technique for the system, the system would have to
be built for such a standard which would take care of the
worst-case scenario of the channel to offer an acceptable bit
error rate (BER). But as the wireless channels vary rapidly
with time, the fixed modulation based system is spectrally
inefficient because it could have used a higher order
modulation format during the good channel condition. To
achieve robust and spectrally efficient communication over
multipath fading channels, adaptive modulation is used which
adapts the transmission scheme to the current channel
characteristics. Taking advantage of the time-varying nature of
wireless channels, the adaptive modulation scheme varies the
transmission power, data rate (constellation size), coding and
modulation schemes, or any combination of these parameters
according to the state of the channel [6]. If the channel can be
estimated then the transmitter can adapt to the current
conditions by varying the modulation type while maintaining a
constant BER. This is typically done by making a channel
estimate at the receiver and transmitting this estimate back to
the transmitter. Thus, the adaptive technique will have a higher
data throughput when the channel conditions are favorable and
will reduce the throughput as the channel worsens. In other
words, the principle of adaptive modulation consists of
allocating many bits to carriers with a high SNR, whereas on
carriers with low SNR only a few or no bits at all are
transmitted. The adaptive control technologies, also known as

the Intelligent Radio Transmission Technologies, for wireless

communication include adaptive equalizer, transmit power
control and adaptive modulation.
Coded OFDM-CDMA with adaptive modulation is under
investigation as attractive techniques for 4G mobile systems, in
which the received signal is usually corrupted by multipath
effects. Steele and Webb [7] proposed burst-by-burst adaptive
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (AQAM) for exploiting the
time variant Shannon channel capacity of narrowband fading
channels. Fixed rate burst-by-burst adaptive systems, which
sacrifice a guaranteed bit error rate (BER) performance for the
sake of maintaining a fixed data throughput, are more
amenable to employment in the context of low-delay
interactive speech and video communications systems. The
above burst-by-burst adaptive principles can also be extended
to adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(AOFDM) schemes [8]. Keller and Hanzo [3] have proposed
adaptive modulation techniques with a set of QPSK and QAM
modulation schemes for OFDM for duplex transmission while
Wasantha [2] investigated an adaptive COFDM-CDMA
system with QAM, PSK and MHPM modulation schemes.
Furthermore various techniques for signaling, channel
estimation, adaptation algorithms and channel coding have
been presented. The total number of subcarriers has been
divided into sub bands and adaptive modulation is applied to
each sub band rather than subcarriers for easy implementation
and to facilitate simple detection methods. A brief description
of important system parameters of adaptive system are
presented below.

Channel Quality Estimation

In order to appropriately select the transmission
parameters to be employed for the next transmission,
a reliable prediction of the channel quality during the
next active transmit timeslot is necessary.

Choice of the appropriate parameters for the next

transmission
Based on the prediction of the expected channel
conditions during the next timeslot, the transmitter
has to select the appropriate modulation schemes for
the subcarriers.

Signaling or blind detection of the employed

parameters
The receiver has to be informed, as to which set of
demodulator parameters to employ for the received
packet. This information can either be conveyed
within the packet, at the cost of loss of useful data
bandwidth, or the receiver can attempt to estimate the
parameters employed at the transmitter by means of
blind detection mechanisms.

B. MC-CDMA
In a multicarrier transmission system, the available channel
bandwidth is divided into multiple subchannels such that data
symbols modulated by different subcarriers can be transmitted in
parallel. In order to make the most of the available bandwidth,

S. Chatterjee et al.: Adaptive Modulation based MC-CDMA Systems for 4G Wireless Consumer Applications

The MC-CDMA transmitter and receiver configurations for the

jth user are shown in figure 1. The MC-CDMA transmitter spreads
the original data stream over different orthogonal subcarriers using
a given spreading code in the frequency domain. The input
information sequence is first converted into P parallel data
sequences (aj,0(i), aj,1(i), , aj,P-1(i)) and each serial/parallel
converter output is multiplied with the spreading code with length
KMC. All the data in total

N = P K MC (corresponding to the

total number of subcarriers) are modulated in baseband by the

inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) and converted back into
serial data. The guard interval is inserted between symbols to
avoid inter symbol interference (ISI) caused by multipath fading,
and finally the signal is transmitted after RF up-conversion. At the
receiver, after down conversion, the m-subcarrier components
(m=0, 1 KMC-1) corresponding to the received data aj,p(i) is first
coherently detected with DFT and then multiplied with the gain
Gj(m) to combine the energy of the received signal scattered in the
frequency domain.
Frequency

d j(K M C -1)

Data
in

Channel
Encoder

S
to
P

Adaptive
Modulator

OFDMCDMA
Transmitter

Modulation
Selector

Channel
Estimator

Channel
Decoder

P
to
S

Demodulator

OFDMCDMA
Receiver

d j(1)

d j(0)

ft)
d j(0) cos(20

a j, O (I)

ID FT

Figure 2: Adaptive modulation based coded MC-CDMA system [2]

tim e

The various system specifications are as tabulated below [2].

cos(2f0t)

S erial parallel
converter

1:P

The block diagram of the adaptive modulation based MCCDMA system is shown in figure 2. Binary data is first
encoded using Turbo coding, followed by serial-to-parallel
conversion to produce low bit-rate streams. Each stream is
then modulated using a suitable digital modulation method,
such as, BPSK, QPSK, 8 PSK, 16 QAM etc, depending on the
channel estimate information provided by the receiver. The
adaptively modulated streams are then passed through the MCCDMA transmitter block, up-converted by an RF amplifier
(not shown in this figure) and transmitted. The receiver
performs the reverse operation to demodulate and decode the
original information. The channel estimator estimates the
quality of the channel (Carrier-to-Noise Ratio, CNR) from the
pilot symbols which are known QPSK symbols and informs
the transmitter. Based on this channel quality estimate, the
transmitter decides the modulation format to be used for the
next transmission. Moreover, it has been assumed that the
receiver is aware of the modulation scheme in use.

Data
out

d j(2)

D ata stream
of user j

III. SYSTEM MODEL AND SPECIFICATIONS

Channel

spectra of the adjacent subchannels are allowed to overlap

without inter-channel interference (ICI) in such a manner that all
information-bearing waveforms of the sub-channels are
orthogonal on some time interval. For high bit rate transmission
(around 30 Mbit/s) over non-ideal propagation channels, OFDM
parallel transmission offers many advantages over conventional
single carrier systems, such as robustness against multipath
frequency selective fading [9].

997

a j,P -I(i)

(K
( M C -1 )ft]
d j(K M C -1) cos[2(

G uard
interval
insertion

TABLE I
SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS

jsM C (t)

(a)
cos(2
ft)

D FT
0

G j(0)
LP F

cos[2(
(P
ft]
( m + p )

cos(2
f0t)
m

LP F

G j(m )
q=P m +p

D j(t)

j,q
rM C (t)

R eceived S ignal
rM C (t)

cos{2[
[P
ft}
[ (K M C -1)+ p ]
P -1

K M C -1

G j(K M C -1)

LP F

(b)
Figure 1: MC-CDMA system for the jth user [10] (a) Transmitter (b)
Receiver

Channel Bandwidth
Frequency
Number of subcarriers
Subcarrier spacing
Information portion of symbol
Cyclic extension duration
Total symbol duration
Symbol rate
Chip rate
CDMA code
Code length

20 MHz
5 GHz
1024
25 kHz
40 s
10 s
50 s
640 ksymbol/s
20.48 Mchips/s
Walsh Hadamard
32 chips

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 49, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2003

TABLE II
FADING CHANNEL SPECIFICATIONS

Mobile speed
Number of paths
Maximum excess delay
Decaying factor

100 km per hour

Four with exponential power
distribution
150 s
10% of symbol duration

TABLE III
TURBO ENCODER AND DECODER SPECIFICATIONS

Rate
Constraint length
Interleaving
Decoding

3
Block interleaving with block size 1024
bits
MAP decoding with hard inputs

Figure 4: BER performance of 8 PSK based MC-CDMA system for a

given number of CDMA users

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The simulations of the Turbo coded MC-CDMA system in

Rayleigh fast fading channel with the above specifications
have been carried out for various M-ary modulation
techniques, viz., M-ary QAM, M-ary PSK, M-ary CPM, and
M-ary MHPM and also for GMSK with varying bit-durationbandwidth-product (BDBP).
Figure 3 indicates how the BER performance varies under
different channel conditions or channel SNR (CSNR) for a
given number of CDMA users with 16 QAM as the
modulation scheme and also the BER performance degradation
with the increase in the number of CDMA users due to
multiple user interference. Figures 4, 5(a) and 5(b) depict the
performance using 8 PSK, 4 QAM (QPSK) and 2 QAM
(BPSK) respectively. As expected, 8 PSK and 4 QAM
(QPSK) are much better than 16 QAM under similar channel
conditions and with the same number of CDMA users. Also,
they can accommodate more number of CDMA users. 2 QAM
(BPSK) is the most robust modulation format in the category
of QAM, which gives the best BER performance. It can
accommodate the highest number of CDMA users while
maintaining a particular BER performance than other methods.

(a)

(b)
Figure 5: BER performance of (a) 4 QAM (QPSK) and (b) 2 QAM
(BPSK) based MC-CDMA system for a given number of CDMA users

Figure 3: BER performance of 16 QAM based MC-CDMA system for a

given number of CDMA users

These simulation results (figures 3 through 5) of BER

performance under different channel conditions and different
number of CDMA users are a prerequisite to the deployment
of adaptive modulation based system. The results clearly show
that higher order modulation formats, which are spectrally
more efficient, need better channel conditions than the lower
order modulation schemes for a better BER criteria.
Figures 6 and 7 shows the BER performance of the adaptive
modulation based MC-CDMA system with varying number of
CDMA users in the Rayleigh fast fading channel with Turbo
coded data with M-ary QAM and M-ary PSK as the
modulation techniques respectively. The switching levels for
the modulation schemes are set to achieve a BER performance

S. Chatterjee et al.: Adaptive Modulation based MC-CDMA Systems for 4G Wireless Consumer Applications

of 10-4 or better. The system was simulated for a fixed channel

condition (CSNR = 15 dB) with varying number of CDMA
users. The system first assigns the highest order modulation
format and as the number of users increases, the system
changes the modulation scheme appropriately according to the
estimated channel conditions (CNR on pilot symbol). If
estimated CNR is within the stored switching level range for
the modulation scheme under operation it maintains the same
modulation format. In figure 6, the process begins with 16
QAM as the modulation scheme. When the number of users
increases to three, the BER degrades below the threshold level
and hence the system switches to 4 QAM. Similarly, the
system switches to 2 QAM when the number of users is seven.

999

(a)

(b)
Figure 6: BER performance of adaptive M-ary QAM (M=2, 4, 16) MCCDMA system with CSNR=15dB

Figure 7: BER performance of adaptive M-ary PSK (M=2, 4, 16) MCCDMA system with CSNR=15dB

Figures 8 (a) and 8 (b) shows the BER performance in

different channel conditions for a given number of CDMA
users for the 2-ary and 4-ary CPM schemes respectively, with
h = 0.875. We see that under similar channel conditions, 2-ary
CPM gives a better performance than the 4-ary scheme. Figure
9 depicts the BER performance of the adaptive M-ary CPM
system.

Figure 8: BER performance of (a) 2-ary CPM and (b) 4-ary CPM based
MC-CDMA system for a given number of CDMA users

Figure 9: BER performance of adaptive M-ary CPM (M=2, 4) MCCDMA system with CSNR=15dB

Figures 10 (a) and 10 (b) represent the BER performance

with binary and 4-ary MHPM modulation schemes
respectively. For these MHPM schemes, a block length of 16
symbols and H parameter set of (2/4, 3/4) for Binary MHPM
and (3/16, 4/16) for 4-ary MHPM have been considered. The
BER performance of binary MHPM has been found to be
better than BPSK. Figure 11 shows the corresponding adaptive
M-ary MHPM system.

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 49, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2003

best scheme in terms of BER performance, followed by BDBP

= 1.0, 0.4 and 0.4 respectively. The BER performance of the
adaptive system is shown in figure 13.

(a)

(a)

(b)
Figure 10: BER performance of (a) 2-ary MHPM and (b) 4-ary MHPM
based MC-CDMA system for a given number of CDMA users

(b)

(c)
Figure 11: BER performance of adaptive M-ary MHPM (M=2, 4) MCCDMA system with CSNR=15dB

Until now in this paper, modulation schemes with M-ary

data formats have been analyzed, viz., M-ary QAM, M-ary
PSK, M-ary MHPM and M-ary CPM. Unlike these techniques,
an adaptive GMSK system can be designed by varying the bitduration-bandwidth-product (BDBP) of the pre-modulation
Gaussian filter. Decreasing the BDBP value in order to
achieve a high spectral efficiency results in the degradation of
BER [11]. Thus, depending upon the channel condition, the
BDBP value can be dynamically changed to maintain the
required BER in a spectrally efficient manner. Figure 12
indicate how the BER performance for the four sets of GMSK
modulation schemes, obtained with BDBP = 0.25, 0.4, 1.0 and
respectively varies under different channel conditions. We
see that under similar channel conditions, BDBP = is the

(d)
Figure 12: BER performance of GMSK based MC-CDMA system for a
given number of CDMA users with BDBP (a) 0.25 (b) 0.4 (c) 1.0 (d)

S. Chatterjee et al.: Adaptive Modulation based MC-CDMA Systems for 4G Wireless Consumer Applications

1001

Figure 13 clearly shows how the switching between the

modulation schemes takes place. For the first three users,
GMSK with BDBP=0.25 is used. As the number of users
increases to four, the channel SNR deteriorates and hence the
system switches to a BDBP of 0.4 so that the BER
performance is maintained below the threshold value (10-4 in
this case). Similarly, when the number of users is between 8
and 12, BDBP = 1 is used while for the worst possible case
(Number of users greater than 12), BDBP = is used. Thus,
this adaptive system maintains the minimum required BER
with an efficient spectrum utilization.
Figure 13: BER performance of adaptive GMSK (BDBP = 0.25, 0.4, 1.0,
) based MC-CDMA system with CSNR=15dB

Tables IV through VIII summarize the data rate per CDMA

user under different adaptive modulation techniques for
different number of CDMA users in the system.

TABLE IV
DATA RATE PER USER IN THE ADAPTIVE M-ARY QAM (M=2, 4, 16) BASED MC-CDMA SYSTEM

Channel SNR

No. of CDMA
Users
12
36
7 - 14

15 dB

Modulation
Scheme
16 QAM
4 QAM
2 QAM

Symbol rate

640 ksymbols/s

Data rate per

User
2.56 Mbits/s
1.28 Mbits/s
640 kbits/s

TABLE V
DATA RATE PER USER IN THE ADAPTIVE M-ARY PSK (M=2, 4, 8) BASED MC-CDMA SYSTEM

Channel SNR

15 dB

No. of CDMA
Users
13
46
7 - 14

Modulation
Scheme
8 PSK
QPSK
BPSK

Symbol rate

640 ksymbols/s

Data rate per User

1.92 Mbits/s
1.28 Mbits/s
640 kbits/s

TABLE VI
DATA RATE PER USER IN THE ADAPTIVE M-ARY CPM (M=2, 4) BASED MC-CDMA SYSTEM

Channel SNR
15 dB

No. of CDMA
Users
2-7
8 - 15

Modulation
Scheme
4-ary CPM
2-ary CPM

Symbol rate
640 ksymbols/s

Data rate per User

1.28 Mbits/s
640 kbits/s

TABLE VII
DATA RATE PER USER IN THE ADAPTIVE M-ARY MHPM (M=2, 4) BASED MC-CDMA SYSTEM

Channel SNR
15 dB

No. of CDMA
Users
2-5
6 - 14

Modulation
Scheme
4-ary MHPM
2-ary MHPM

Symbol rate
640 ksymbols/s

Data rate per User

1.28 Mbits/s
640 kbits/s

TABLE VIII
DATA RATE PER USER IN THE ADAPTIVE GMSK BASED MC-CDMA SYSTEM

Channel SNR

15 dB

No. of CDMA
Users
2-3
4-7
8 - 12
13- 15

Bit-DurationBandwidth Product
0.25
0.4
1.0

Symbol rate

640 ksymbols/s

Data rate per

User
640 kbits/s

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IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 49, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2003

After analyzing various digital modulation schemes and

their corresponding applications in the adaptive modulation
based coded MC-CDMA system, we can now compare the
performance of these systems. Figure 14 shows the comparison
of these adaptive systems at a channel SNR of 15 dB.

REFERENCES
[1] Watson James A., 4G Wireless Systems: Part II, Xcell
Journal [Online]. Available:
http://www.xilinx.com/publications/products/v2/wireless.htm.
[2] Wasantha M.K., Adaptive Modulation Techniques for
OFDM-CDMA based 4G Mobile Networks, Master Thesis,
Telecommunications Program, School of Advanced
Technologies, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, 2002.
[3] Keller T., Hanzo L., Adaptive Modulation Techniques for
Duplex OFDM Transmission, IEEE Transactions on
Vehicular Technology, Vol.49, No.5, pp. 1893-1906,
September 2000.

Figure 14: Comparison of the various adaptive modulation based coded

MC-CDMA systems in Rayleigh fast fading channel at channel SNR = 15
dB

Comparing the BER curves of all these systems at a given

channel SNR (CSNR = 15 dB) with varying number of
simultaneous users show that the continuous phase modulation
schemes like CPM, MHPM and GMSK give better
performance as compared to PSK and QAM schemes. At most
of the time, the MHPM system outperforms both GMSK and
CPM. The PSK and QAM based systems perform better than
other schemes for less number of users (less than 10). As a
whole, the adaptive MHPM system is found to give the
optimum performance among the considered digital
modulation schemes for the MC-CDMA system in Rayleigh
fast fading environment for 4G wireless networks.

[4] Wasantha M.K., Fernando W.A.C., Adaptive Modulation

Techniques for COFDM-CDMA based Wireless Networks,
Proceedings
of
Wireless
Personal
Multimedia
Communications, WPMC 2002, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2002.
[5] Chen J., Wang Y., Adaptive MLSE Equalizers with
Parametric Tracking for Multipath Fast-Fading Channels,
IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 49, No.4, pp.
665-663, April 2001.
[6] Ormeci P., Liu X., Goeckel D., Wesel R., Adaptive BitInterleaved Coded Modulation, IEEE Transactions on
Communications, Vol. 49, No.9, pp. 1572-1581, September
2001.
[7] Steele R., Webb W., Variable Rate QAM for Data
Transmission over Rayleigh Fading Channels, Proceedings of
Wireless91, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 1991, pp.1-14.

V. CONCLUSION

In this paper, various adaptive modulation based coded MCCDMA systems have been studied in Rayleigh fast fading
environment for the 4G wireless based consumer applications.
The digital modulation schemes considered are M-ary QAM,
M-ary PSK, M-ary CPM, M-ary MHPM, and GMSK with
varying bit-duration-bandwidth product. The results of the
adaptive systems clearly indicate that the dynamic switching of
the modulation format can enhance the system capacity per
given bandwidth substantially without sacrificing the expected
BER performance. With adaptive modulation, the bit rate per
given bandwidth is no longer a constant as in the case of fixed
modulation based systems but varies dynamically according to
the varying channel conditions.
It is found that the system using M-ary MHPM as the
modulation scheme performs the best among the considered
modulation schemes. Hence, an adaptive M-ary MHPM
modulation based MC-CDMA system can be highly effective
in supporting high data rate services with mobility in the 4G
wireless networks, taking substantial care of the inter-symbol
interference (ISI) due to multipath and providing adequate
bandwidth for the intended services.

[8] Keller T., Hanzo L., Adaptive Orthogonal Frequency

Division Multiplexing Schemes, Proceedings of ACTS
Summit, Rhodos, Greece, June 8-10, 1998, pp. 794-799.
[9] Li J., Kavehrad M., OFDM-CDMA Systems with
Nonlinear Power Amplifier, in Proceedings of WCNC'99,
New Orleans, USA, September 1999.
[10] Nee Van, Prasad Ramji, OFDM for Wireless Multimedia
Communications, Artech House, 2000.
[11] Xiong Fuqin, Digital Modulation Techniques, Artech
House, 2000.

S. Chatterjee et al.: Adaptive Modulation based MC-CDMA Systems for 4G Wireless Consumer Applications

S. Chatterjee received his Bachelor of

Engineering (B.E.) degree in Electronics &
Telecommunications
Engineering
from
Gauhati University, India in 1999. He has
worked in the operations and maintenance
fields of GSM 900 Switching Systems at
Reliance Telecom Ltd., India for two years. He has also
worked as a Guest Lecturer at Assam Engineering College,
Guwahati, India for two months and as a Student Assistant at
Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand for six months.
Currently, he is pursuing his Master of Engineering in
Telecommunications from the School of Advanced
Technologies at Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand.
W.A.C. Fernando received the B.Sc.
Engineering degree (First class) in Electronic
and Telecommunications Engineering from
the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in
1995 and the MEng degree (Distinction) in
Telecommunications from Asian Institute of
Technology, Bangkok, Thailand in 1997. He
has completed his PhD at the Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, UK in February
2001. Since then he has been working as an Assistant
Professor at the Asian Institute of Technology. His current
research interests include digital image and video processing,
intelligent video encoding, OFDM and CDMA for wireless
channels, channel coding and modulation schemes for wireless
channels. He has published more than 60 international papers
on these areas.

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M.K. Wasantha received the B.Sc. (First Class) degree in Electronic

and Telecommunication Engineering from the
University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 1995 and
the Master of Engineering degree in Asian
Institute of Technology, Thailand in 2002. His
research interests include adaptive modulation
techniques for wireless channels and channel
coding for OFDM networks.