Joint optimisation of 'transmission rate' and 'outer-loop' SNR target adaptation over fading channel

Joint optimization of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) target and transmission rate adaptation is examined for multilevel quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) over flat-fading channels, to maximize the spectral efficiency subject to an average transmit power constraint. We propose an adaptive transmission scheme in which the outer-loop SNR target and data rate are adapted to bit-error rate (BER), where total or truncated channel-inversion strategies are exploited for the (fast) inner-loop power control. We obtain the optimal solutions for both continuous and discrete rate adaptation, and consider cases where diversity combining is performed in the receiver. We show that by using this BER-based adaptive scheme, spectral efficiency can be improved compared with optimal SNR-based variable-rate variable-power MQAM. We also show that for continuous rate adaptation, the optimal SNR target monotonically increases with BER, while it descends within a BER range with constant rate.