Abstract
This paper presents the performance evaluation of an adaptive QAM scheme under flat and frequency selective fading channels for indoor wireless communication systems. The QAM modulation is combined with differential encoding and the demodulation process is carried out noncoherently. The adaptation is performed by varying the modulation level of QAM, depending upon received signal strength. The adaptation mechanism allows a 2- or 3-bit increase or decrease at a time, if the channel condition is considered to be significantly good or bad. Simulation results show that the average number of bits per symbol (ABPS) for each symbol block transmitted over a flat fading channel is higher than 5.0 and the BER performance is better than 10^-4 for a SNR value higher than 30 dB. For frequency selective fading channels, an oversampling technique in the receiver was employed. The BER performance obtained for frequency selective fading channels is better than 10^-4 with a SNR value of 40 dB and ABPS is found to be approximately 5.5. Therefore, this scheme is very useful in that it provides both very high bandwidth efficiency and acceptable performance with moderate SNR values over flat and frequency selective fading channels. In addition, this scheme provides reduced receiver complexity by way of noncoherent detection.