Performance Comparison of Adaptive

Modulation and Coding in OFDM Systems

Using Signalling and Automatic Modulation
Classication
L. H aring, C. Kisters
Chair of Communication Systems
University Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
{haering,christian.kisters}@nts.uni-duisburg-essen.de
AbstractThis paper compares the system performance
of signalling and automatic modulation classication in adap-
tive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-
based systems in time-division duplex (TDD) mode. In pre-
vious theoretical contributions, transmitter-side joint adap-
tive modulation and coding (AM+C) techniques have been
proposed which can be used to either increase the data
rate or, alternatively, improve the link reliability. Since the
receiver must be synchronized to the transmit parameters,
the required signalling overhead reduces the benet of
adaptive modulation and coding when applied to practical
systems. Numerical results in terms of the effective data
bandwidth efciency reveal the potential of recently devel-
oped automatic modulation classiers as an alternative to
conventional signalling schemes.
Index TermsOFDM, adaptive modulation and coding,
automatic modulation classication, signalling
I. INTRODUCTION
Subcarrier-wise adaptation of the modulation scheme to
the current channel state (adaptive modulation) has been
proven to be a suitable technique to enhance the data
throughput and/or the link reliability in orthogonal fre-
quency division multiplexing transmission systems [1],
[2]. Recent investigations in [3], [4] have shown a signi-
cant additional improvement if the modulation and coding
schemes are jointly selected (adaptive modulation and
coding). Due to practical issues, the same coding scheme
is typically used for a larger block of subcarriers.
For performance studies of all these algorithms, perfect
knowledge of the chosen modulation and coding schemes
at the receiver side was assumed. In contrast to wired links
like digital subscriber line (DSL), the time-variant radio
channels necessitates a frequent update of the optimal bit
allocation table (BAT) and the optimal coding schemes
in wireless systems.
1
However, in order to decode the re-
ceived signal, the reveiver must know about these changes.
In this contribution, two possible solutions to synchro-
nize the knowledge of the transmitter and receiver are
presented and compared:
1
The BAT contains the set of modulation schemes used on each
subcarrier.
Conventionally, the transmit parameters, particularly
the BAT and the coding schemes, are explicitly
signalled to the receiver. Previous studies have shown
that even highly sophisticated signalling schemes
based upon state-dependent source coding cause
large overheads which reduce the effective data rate
signicantly [5].
Alternatively, the BAT can automatically be classied
at the receiver side. Hereby, we assume that the
same coding scheme is applied commonly to all
subcarriers and hence, the signalling overhead of
this single information can be neglected. Generally,
the granularity of the chosen modulation schemes is
much higher than that of the coding schemes, i. e.,
a common coding scheme is used over a span of
subcarriers.
Automatic modulation classication algorithms have
already been explored intensively since several
decades. A comprehensive overview of likelihood-
based and feature-based algorithms can be found
e. g. in [6]. Usually, one major drawback of blind
techniques is the high number of samples re-
quired to achieve a sufcient performance. However,
the authors presented a maximum-a-posteriori-based
(MAP) automatic modulation classication algorithm
[7] which is highly effective already for short OFDM
frames.
In this work, the performance of these two approaches
in terms of the effective data bandwidth efciency is
analyzed by numerical investigations.
The paper is organized as follows: Section II intro-
duces the signal model and formulates the problem to be
analyzed. In section III, a brief overview of signalling
schemes is given. Sections IV and V explain the major
aspects of the proposed automatic modulation classier
and used adaptive modulation and coding technique, re-
spectively. Simulation results to compare both signalling
and automatic classication in the adaptive OFDM system
are presented in section VI. Finally, conclusions are drawn
in section VII.
Preamble
CE
time
Uplink
Downlink
CE

H
n,k
1
,UL

H
n,k
2
,DL
BS calculates
MS calculates
AM+C
AM
b
Rx
b
Tx
Preamble Data (no AM+C)
Sig Data (b
Tx
applied)
Fig. 1. Time-division duplex system model (CE: channel estimation, AM+C: adaptive modulation and coding, AM: adaptive modulation)
II. SIGNAL MODEL AND PROBLEM
The transmission in a perfectly synchronized OFDM sys-
tem can be modeled by
d
n,k
= H
n,k
s
n,k
+ v
n,k
, (1)
where d
n,k
, s
n,k
and H
n,k
denote the received data sym-
bol, the transmitted data symbol and the transfer function
value on the n-th subcarrier of the k-th OFDM block. One
transmitted frame consists of N subcarriers and K OFDM
data blocks. The additive white noise exhibits a complex
Gaussian distribution, i. e. v
n,k
CN(0,
2
v
). In OFDM
systems using adaptive modulation and coding, symbols
s
n,k
on different subcarriers can emanate from different
symbol alphabets. The coding scheme which is applied to
all subcarriers is conventionally signalled to the receiver
and thus, is assumed to be known to the receiver. Since
the amount of signalling overhead caused by this single
information is much smaller than that of the modulation
schemes, its inuence on the overall system performance
can be neglected.
Fig. 1 shows the signal ow at the initiation of adaptive
modulation and coding in the downlink (DL) of the
considered TDD system model:
1a) In the uplink (UL), the mobile station transmits a
frame composed of training symbols and data.
b) The base station (BS) carries out a preamble-based
channel estimation. Based upon the estimated UL
channel transfer function

H
n,k
1
,UL
, it calculates the
optimal BAT b
Tx
(and coding scheme) using an
adaptive modulation and coding algorithm.
2a) In the DL, the base station transmits a frame com-
posed of training, possibly signalling information and
data according to b
Tx
.
b) The mobile station (MS) carries out a preamble-
based channel estimation. Based upon the estimated
DL channel transfer function

H
n,k
2
,DL
, it calculates
the optimal BAT b
Rx
while keeping the previously
chosen coding scheme using the same algorithm as
the BS.
For data recovery, the receiver requires the knowledge
of b
Tx
which is either signalled explicitly or blindly
classied.
III. REVIEW ON SIGNALLING
In this section, different signalling concepts which have
been analyzed in [5] are briey reviewed. Note that no
feedback loop is required in the adaptive transmission
scheme enabled by reciprocity in TDD systems. Thus,
the signalling information is incorporated in the DL trans-
mit frame here.
Let us suppose that the bit loading algorithm at the
transmitter side chooses between N
mod
different modula-
tion schemes, each scheme could be encoded by a binary
codeword with
L
Sig,1
= log
2
(N
mod
) [bit/mod] (2)
digits per modulation scheme. Since we will focus on
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) schemes with
bandwidth efciencies in the range from 0, 1, . . . 10
bit/symbol, we set N
mod
= 11, and, hence:
L
Sig,1
= 4 bit/mod . (3)
A more efcient approach is to jointly encode modulation
schemes of multiple or even all (N) subcarriers. The
average number of binary digits per modulation scheme
reduces to:
L
Sig,2
=
_
log
2
(N
N
mod
)
_
N
=
N log
2
(N
mod
)
N
3.47 bit/mod (4)
for N
mod
= 11 and N = 64. If the coherence time
and coherence bandwidth are large in comparison to the
frame duration and subcarrier spacing, respectively, the
correlation in time and frequency direction can be ex-
ploited to lower the amount of signalling information. The
contribution [5] models the BATs of subsequent transmit
frames as a Markoff source of rst order to introduce
state-dependent Huffman coding schemes. Under ideal
conditions, the amount of signalling information can be
reduced to a fraction of (2). However, the benet strongly
depends on the propagation scenario, adaptive transmitter
algorithm etc. Channel estimation errors deteriorate the
effectivity of the state-dependent signalling scheme in
[5]. Furthermore a probability-based signalling method
requires the exact a-priori knowledge of the channel statis-
tics and large lookup-tables for numerous propagation
conditions which seems to be not applicable in practical
systems.
A large potential to reduce the amount of signalling
information is seen if modications of the transmitter-side
loading algorithm are allowed. E. g., if BAT updates both
in time and frequency direction are restricted to only a
few steps, differential signalling becomes effective. Since
changes of the transmit algorithms are beyond the scope
of this contribution, the signalization scheme resulting in
(4) which can be easily realized in practical setups is
investigated in section VI.
IV. REVIEW OF AUTOMATIC MODULATION
CLASSIFICATION
We briey review the concept of automatic modulation
classication (AMC) which will be compared with the
signalling scheme. The key aspect for a high classi-
cation reliability turns out to be the utilization of side
information which is typically available in wireless TDD
communication systems like the channel reciprocity, the
channel correlation in time and frequency direction and
the knowledge about the number of loaded bits.
A. MAP-based classication
The proposed MAP-based blind technique [7] classi-
es the BAT b
Tx
solely based upon the observations
made by the receiver and can therefore be formulated
as a maximization problem of the conditional probability
p(b
Tx
|d, b
Rx
):

b
Tx
= argmax
b
Tx
{ p(b
Tx
|d, b
Rx
)} . (5)
Here, d includes the information about the data symbols
of all subcarriers and OFDM blocks with the notation
d = [d
1
, d
2
, . . . , d
N
] (6)
d
n
= [d
n,1
, d
n,2
, . . . , d
n,K
] . (7)
The BAT vectors b
Tx
,

b
Tx
and b
Rx
are composed of the
used bandwidth efciencies on all subcarriers:
b
Tx
= [b
Tx,1
, b
Tx,2
, . . . , b
Tx,N
] (8)

b
Tx
= [

b
Tx,1
,

b
Tx,2
, . . . ,

b
Tx,N
] (9)
b
Rx
= [b
Rx,1
, b
Rx,2
, . . . , b
Rx,N
] . (10)
Note that the BATs are valid for each OFDM block within
one transmission frame, but can vary from frame to frame.
Motivated by assuming independent modulation schemes
and also independent data symbols on different subcar-
riers, we could approximate the maximization problem
in (5) simplest by a subcarrier-independent approach
(1 n N):

b
Tx,n
argmax
b
Tx,n
{p(b
Tx,n
|d
n
, b
Rx,n
)} , (11)
or in a more sophisticated way using the knowledge
about the overall number of loaded bits N
bit
by [8]

b
Tx
argmax
b
Tx
_
N

n=1
p(b
Tx,n
|d
n
, b
Rx,n
)
_
s.t.
N

n=1
b
Tx,n
= N
bit
, (12)
classication
N N
crit
N
crit
Sorting by
reliability criterion
Metric calculation
for 1 n N
subcarrier-independ.
classication
joint
Fig. 2. Two-step classication algorithm
Since the search over all hypotheses combinations in (12)
seems to be infeasible in real-time systems, a trade-off
between the subcarrier-independent search in (11) and the
joint approach in (12) is introduced in [8].
The main idea is to divide the set of all subcarriers S
into a subset S
rel
S including reliable decisions and a
subset S
crit
S with critical decisions:
S := {1, 2, . . . , N} (13)
S
rel
:= {n| reliable decision} (14)
S
crit
:= {n| critical decision} (15)
= S \ S
rel
. (16)
For the reliable decisions, the subcarrier-independent ap-
proach in (11) is carried out rst. In a second step, the
more complex algorithm in (12) is performed for the
critical decisions considering the number of residual bits
that have not been loaded in the rst step. The number
of critical decisions N
crit
= |S
crit
| (equals the number of
elements in S
crit
) is a design parameter of this algorithm
which balances performance and complexity.
Clearly, the categorization rule into reliable and critical
decisions is crucial. A good reliability indicator turns out
to be the absolute difference between the highest and the
second highest metric value rather than the signal-to-noise
power ratio. The structure of the algorithm is summarized
in Fig. 2.
B. Metric calculation
For both algorithms (11) and (12), the conditional proba-
bilities p(b
Tx,n
|d
n
, b
Rx,n
) must be calculated. It is shown
in [8] that by using the simplication
p(d
n
|b
Tx,n
, b
Rx,n
) p(d
n
|b
Tx,n
) , (17)
the conditional probability p(b
Tx,n
|d
n
, b
Rx,n
) can be ap-
proximated by (18) (see next page), where the aver-
age transmit signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) is =
E{|S
(b
Tx,n
)
i
|
2
}/
2
v
(= average symbol energy to noise
spectral density E
S
/N
0
, E
S
= E{|S
(b
Tx,n
)
i
|
2
} = 1
and E{|H
n,k
|
2
} = 1. In (18), S
(b
Tx,n
)
i
denotes the i-
th complex-valued constellation symbol of the b
Tx,n
-th
constellation set. We focus on QAM schemes, such that
p(b
Tx,n
|d
n
, b
Rx,n
)
K

k=1
1
2
b
Tx,n
2
b
Tx,n

i=1
exp
_
|d
n,k
H
n,k
S
(b
Tx,n
)
i
|
2
_
p(b
Tx,n
, b
Rx,n
) (18)
the b
Tx,n
-th constellation set I
(b
Tx,n
)
follows a 2
(b
Tx,n
)
-
QAM which is composed of the constellation symbols:
I
(b
Tx,n
)
=
_
S
(b
Tx,n
)
1
, S
(b
Tx,n
)
2
, . . . , S
(b
Tx,n
)
2
b
Tx,n
_
. (19)
In order to reduce the metric complexity, the approxima-
tion

L
l=1
exp{x
l
} max
l
(exp{x
l
}) was investi-
gated in [7]. From (12) and (18) follows the classication
algorithm:

b
Tx
argmax
b
Tx
_
K ln 2
b
Tx,n

n=1

k=1
min
S
(b
Tx,n
)
i
I
(b
Tx,n
)
|
(b
Tx,n
)
n,k,i
|
2
+ln p(b
n,Tx
, b
n,Rx
)
_
s.t.
N

n=1
b
Tx,n
= N
bit
, (20)
where
(b
Tx,n
)
n,k,i
= d
n,k
/H
n,k
S
(b
Tx,n
)
i
represents the dis-
tance between each possible constellation symbol and the
equalized received symbol and
n
denotes the subcarrier
SNR.
C. Approximation of joint probabilities
In practical systems, the information about the joint prob-
abilities p(b
Tx,n
, b
Rx,n
) is usually not available. An ana-
lytical solution to calculate these probabilities, however,
is extremely difcult due to the mutual inuence of the
AM+C algorithm, multipath propagation scenario, noise
level etc. Here, we analyze a heuristic approximation
approach instead.
One important result in [7] was the observation to better
utilize the receiver-side capacity metric

b
Rx,n
= log
2
_
1 +

n

_
(21)
as soft information, rather than the already discretized
modulation order b
Rx,n
. The parameter encounters
the SNR gap [9] and is used to adapt the bandwidth
efciencies to the desired data rate.
In (20), we replace p(b
Tx,n
, b
Rx,n
) by p(b
Tx,n
,

b
Rx,n
)
and use the heuristic measure
p(b
Tx,n
,

b
Rx,n
) exp
_

(b
Tx,n

b
Rx,n
)
2
2
2
_
(22)
to approximate the joint probabilities. By assuming a
Gaussian distributed deviation with the design parameter
, bandwidth efciencies b
Tx,n
under test which are
closer to

b
Rx,n
are said to be more likely than others.
V. ADAPTIVE MODULATION AND CODING
The application of automatic modulation classication at
the receiver side is not restricted to any specic adaptive
modulation and coding scheme at the transmitter side.
Exemplarily, the algorithm used here to compare sig-
nalization and automatic classication of the BAT is based
upon [4] and [9]. It uses a precalculated lookup table
for modulation and coding schemes which are found by
numerical evaluation of the frame-error ratio in equivalent
additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Rate-
compatible punctured convolutional codes with variable
code rates R
C,Data
= {8/24, 8/22, 8/20, 8/18, 8/16,
8/14, 8/12, 8/10, 8/9, 8/8} [10], a constraint length of 4
and soft-decoding at the receiver side are considered. The
algorithm chooses between QAM schemes with bandwith
efciencies from 0, 1, . . . 10 bit/symbol.
According to [4], the algorithm is composed of two
steps: 1) nding the optimal code rate as an average of all
subcarrier code rates and 2) bit loading with the code rate
determined in 1). In the second step, no power loading
is considered in contrast to [4]. Instead, bit loading is
carried out using the algorithm in [9] since power loading
as included in [4] would lead only to a minor performance
improvement, whereas the amount of signalling informa-
tion would drastically increase. Moreover, we assume that
the code rate is kept constant in the observation time of
subsequent frames.
VI. NUMERICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this section, simulations are carried out to validate
the overall system performance of automatic modulation
classication in comparison to a signalling-based trans-
mission. Investigations are focussed on indoor propaga-
tion scenarios typical for wireless local area networks
(WLAN).
The goal of the adaptive scheme is to achieve the
highest effective data bandwidth efciency at a predened
transmission link quality in terms of the target frame error
ratio (FER) of 10
2
.
A. Simulation setup and simulation concept
If not stated otherwise, the simulation parameters of the
OFDM transmission concordant to the IEEE 802.11a/n
standard in Table I are used. For the automatic modulation
classication algorithm, we set the design parameters to
= 0.3 and N
crit
= 2. Moreover, it is assumed that
the receiver has perfect knowledge about the total number
of loaded bits N
bit
. Since the signalling information
must be transmitted very reliably, the signalization bits
are convolutionally encoded (constraint length of 4, with
TABLE I
SIMULATION SETUP
parameter value
sampling period T 50 ns (20 MHz bandwidth)
FFT length N 64
cyclic prex length N
cp
16
Delay spread
ds
100 ns [11]
Doppler frequency f
dop
15 Hz (Jakes spectrum)
x
x
x
time
f
r
e
q
u
e
n
c
y
Information data
i
n
f
o
r
m
a
t
i
o
n
S
i
g
n
a
l
l
i
n
g
N
Data
= K N symbols N
Sig
symbols
T
r
a
i
n
i
n
g
s
e
q
u
e
n
c
e
Fig. 3. Frame structure composed of training, signalling and information
data block
termination) with a xed code rate of R
Sig
= 1/2 and
4-QAM-modulated.
Fig. 3 shows the considered frame structure which
includes a preamble, a block composed of N
Sig
symbols
containing the signalling information and a block con-
taining N
Data
information data symbols with the average
number of loaded bits per subcarrier b
Data
. In order to
isolate effects, timing and frequency synchronization is
assumed to be perfect. Based upon the training sequence
of the length of two OFDM blocks, the receiver estimates
the channel using a zero-forcing algorithm with window-
ing in the time-domain [12].
Neglecting the training sequence to particularly focus
on the inuence of signalling, the effective data bandwidth
efciency is dened as:

e
=
number of information data bits per frame
overall number of symbols per frame
=
N
Data
b
Data
R
C,Data
N
Data
+ N
Sig
=
N
Data

0
N
Data
+ N
Sig
(23)
In (23), the raw data bandwidth efciency
0
= b
Data

R
C,Data
is solely related to the information data block.
The effective data bandwidth efciency parameter
e
is
used as a comparison criterion between the considered
signalling-based and signalling-free transmission scheme.
For varying bandwidth efciencies
0
, the FER of
different transmission schemes is numerically evaluated.
Frame errors occur if the receiver is not able to recover
the underlying BAT which the transmitter has used either
AMC or Data
Signalling or Data
Data
AMC
Signalling
F
r
a
m
e
e
r
r
o
r
r
a
t
i
o
E
S
/N
0
[dB]
10 5 0 5 10
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
Fig. 4. Frame error ratios for different transmission schemes versus
E
S
/N
0
with N
Data

0
= 20 64 symbols 0.5 bit/symbol = 640
bit, 4-QAM signalling bits with R
C
= 0.5, L
Sig,2
= 3.47 bit/mod, no
subcarrier grouping
due to signalling bit errors (Signalling) or, modulation
classication errors (AMC), respectively or if the pay-
load is erroneously detected (Data). In order to compare
the two adaptive concepts with and without signalling, a
frame is considered to be lost if
1) already one signalling or data bit is erroneously
detected (Signalling or Data) and
2) already one modulation scheme is erroneously clas-
sied or a data bit is erroneously detected (AMC
or Data).
By varying the bandwidth efciencies
0
, the required
SNR for a target FER of 10
2
is analyzed and is related
to the bandwidth efciency
e
. Note that the information
data block length is kept constant for a simulation scenario
whereas the signalization block length changes with the
signalling concept. With increasing number of required
signalization symbols N
Sig
, the effective data bandwidth
efciency
e
decreases due to the longer frame duration.
As an example, Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 show the FER versus
E
S
/N
0
for
0
= 0.5 bit/symbol and
0
= 2 bit/symbol if
adaptive modulation and coding is used at the transmitter:
For
0
= 0.5 bit/symbol, frame errors are dominated by
modulation classication errors in the case of a signalling-
free transmission (AMC and AMC or Data coincide)
and also by signalization bit errors in the signalling-based
concept (Signalling and Signalling or Data coincide).
For a larger bandwidth efciency of
0
= 2 bit/symbol,
the number of classication and signalization bit errors
can be neglected compared to the number of data bits
errors.
B. Simulation results
In this section, the nal performance comparison of an
adaptive OFDM system with signalling and with auto-
matic modulation classication in terms of the effective
data bandwidth efciency gained from the FER com-
putations are presented. Fig. 6 shows the effective data
AMC or Data
Signalling or Data
Data
AMC
Signalling
F
r
a
m
e
e
r
r
o
r
r
a
t
i
o
E
S
/N
0
[dB]
5 0 5 10 15 20
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
Fig. 5. Frame error ratios for different transmission schemes versus
E
S
/N
0
with N
Data

0
= 20 64 symbols 2 bit/symbol = 2560
bit, 4-QAM signalling bits with R
C
= 0.5, L
Sig,2
= 3.47 bit/mod, no
subcarrier grouping
no bit loading
AM+C, BAT: signalled
AM+C, BAT: classied
AM+C, BAT: ideal
B
a
n
d
w
i
d
t
h
e
f

c
i
e
n
c
y

[
b
i
t
/
s
y
m
b
o
l
]
E
S
/N
0
[dB]
5 10 15 20 25
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
Fig. 6. Effective data bandwidth efencies
e
versus E
S
/N
0
, data
frame length K = 20, 4-QAM signalling bits with R
C
= 0.5, L
Sig,2
=
3.47 bit/mod, no subcarrier grouping
bandwidth efciency
e
versus E
S
/N
0
with K = 20 data
OFDM blocks for four different transmission schemes.
Both the case with adaptive modulation and coding and
ideal knowledge about the BAT and the case without bit
loading are included as reference curves. In addition, the
results of the adaptive OFDM transmission schemes with
conventional signalization of the BAT and the receiver-
side AMC are depicted. The following conclusions can
be drawn from Fig. 6:
The overall system performance in terms of
e
is
worst if no bit loading technique is used at the trans-
mitter side. For the considered simulation scenario
and SNR range, the system can benet from adaptive
modulation, regardless of the method to inform the
receiver about the BAT.
Due to the required overhead, BAT signalling reduces
the overall system performance signicantly. For
smaller SNR, erroneously detected signalling bits
cause an additional performance reduction. A more
no bit loading
AM+C, BAT: signalled
AM+C, BAT: classied
AM+C, BAT: ideal
AM+C, BAT: ideal (no gr.)
B
a
n
d
w
i
d
t
h
e
f

c
i
e
n
c
y

[
b
i
t
/
s
y
m
b
o
l
]
E
S
/N
0
[dB]
5 10 15 20 25
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
Fig. 7. Effective data bandwidth efencies
e
versus E
S
/N
0
, data
frame length K = 20, 4-QAM signalling bits with R
C
= 0.5, L
Sig,2
=
3.47 bit/mod, two subcarriers are grouped (except reference curve with
no subcarrier grouping)
robust transmission of the signalling bits (lower code
rate, lower-order modulation scheme) could lower
this effect, but leads to even higher overheads.
For SNR values larger than 14 dB, the transmis-
sion scheme with the proposed automatic modula-
tion classication method outperforms the signalling-
based and the non-adaptive scheme. Between 15
and 23 dB, the number of misclassifed BATs can
be even neglected compared to frame errors caused
by data bit errors. For SNR smaller than 15 dB,
BAT classication errors dominate the overall system
performance.
Fig. 7 shows the effective data bandwidth efciency for the
same scenarios, but with subcarrier grouping. Due to the
small subcarrier spacing compared with the channel coher-
ence bandwidth of the considered propagation channel, the
AM algorithm could adapt the bandwidth efciencies for
a group of two neighbouring subcarriers. The modulation
classier utilizes this subcarrier grouping by additively
combining the corresponding metric values. In order to be
able to relate the results in Fig. 7 to the previous scenario
without subcarrier grouping in Fig. 6, the result of the
ideal adaptive transmission from Fig. 6 (upper bound) is
depicted as a reference curve. The following aspects are
important:
By comparing the two cases with ideal knowledge
of the BAT, it can be clearly seen that grouping
of subcarriers in the bit loading scheme causes a
performance degradation, especially at larger SNRs.
Subgroup-wise modulation adaptation, however, still
outperforms the non-adaptive scheme.
On the one hand, less signalling overhead is required
if subcarriers are grouped in the bit loading algo-
rithm. On the other hand, the lower granularity of
the adaption reduces the system performance. For
the considered setup, both effects compensate each
other leading to a similar effective data bandwidth
no bit loading
AM+C, BAT: signalled
AM+C, BAT: classied
AM+C, BAT: ideal
B
a
n
d
w
i
d
t
h
e
f

c
i
e
n
c
y

[
b
i
t
/
s
y
m
b
o
l
]
E
S
/N
0
[dB]
5 10 15 20 25
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
Fig. 8. Effective data bandwidth efencies
e
versus E
S
/N
0
, data
frame length K = 50, 4-QAM signalling bits with R
C
= 0.5, L
Sig,2
=
3.47 bit/mod, no subcarrier grouping
no bit loading
AM+C, BAT: signalled
AM+C, BAT: classied
AM+C, BAT: ideal
AM+C, BAT: ideal (no gr.)
B
a
n
d
w
i
d
t
h
e
f

c
i
e
n
c
y

[
b
i
t
/
s
y
m
b
o
l
]
E
S
/N
0
[dB]
5 10 15 20 25
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
Fig. 9. Effective data bandwidth efencies
e
versus E
S
/N
0
, data
frame length K = 50, 4-QAM signalling bits with R
C
= 0.5, L
Sig,2
=
3.47 bit/mod, two subcarriers are grouped
efciency for subcarrier-wise and subgroup-wise bit
loading.
The transmission scheme with automatic modulation
classication at the receiver still outperforms the
signalling-based scheme. With subcarrier grouping,
the classication reliability is higher due to the
lower number of modulation schemes to classify and
the higher number of symbols that can be utilized.
Therefore, the effective data bandwidth efciency
with modulation classication is close to the case
with ideal BAT knowledge for a larger SNR range.
However, besides the low SNR range, transmission
with subcarrier-wise AM including automatic modu-
lation classication is still superior compared to the
case with subcarrier grouping.
Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 depict the effective bandwidth efciency

e
versus E
S
/N
0
for the same scenarios as in Fig. 6 and
Fig. 7, but for a longer frame with K = 50 data OFDM
blocks. Additionally to the conclusions for K = 20, it
can be seen that
grouping of subcarriers increasingly degrades the
system performance with larger frame lengths,
the reduction of the effective data bandwidth due to
signalling overhead gets signicantly smaller,
the performance degradation due to BAT classica-
tion errors reduces since the classier becomes more
reliable, and, nally,
the adaptive transmission scheme with classication
still outperforms the scheme with signalization in the
considered SNR range.
If the proposed automatic modulation classier is applied,
one can fully benet from AM+C (of course, at costs
of a higher complexity) in a wide SNR range without
sacricing the throughput due to BAT signalization.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
In this contribution, we analyzed the system performance
of adaptive modulation and coding in wireless OFDM
systems in TDD mode. Since the receiver must be syn-
chronized to the transmit parameters, particularly the bit
allocation table, a huge amount of signalling overhead is
typically required in mobile communications. We briey
reviewed different signalling schemes and presented an
effective automatic modulation classication algorithm
which avoids the need of signalization. Numerical results
in terms of the effective data bandwidth efciency show
for different transmission scenarios that the transmission
scheme using adaptive modulation and coding outper-
forms the non-adaptive scheme despite signalling over-
head or BAT classication errors. Moreover, for a large
SNR range, the application of the receiver-side automatic
modulation classication is superior to the considered
signalization scheme.
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