The tremendous growth in demand for wireless communications capacity has created a need for new modulation, coding and detection methods that more efficiently use the multipath fading channels encountered in mobile radio. Since the channel changes rapidly, the transmitter and receiver are not generally optimized for current channel conditions, and thus fail to exploit the full potential of the wireless channel. The shorter wavelengths proposed for future mobile radio will only serve to aggravate these problems. This research focuses on joint utilization of adaptive modulation and coding techniques, transmitter diversity methods and fading prediction algorithms suitable for rapidly varying multipath fading channels.
In this research, a new approach to communication over fast-fading channels is exploited. The unifying idea is to predict future fading conditions at the receiver, and to feed these predictions to the transmitter for the optimization of the transmitted signal. This research is an interdisciplinary effort in communication theory, physics, and signal processing that encompasses novel physical models for multipath fading, channel prediction and tracking methods, and adaptive modulation, coding and power-control algorithms. The ultimate goal of this work is to more fully exploit the potential capacity of wireless communication channels, and in the process reduce the associated power and bandwidth requirements.
