Adaptive modulation, adaptive coding, and power control for fixed cellular broadband wireless systems: some new insights

1 This work was supported by the Canadian Institute for Telecommunication Research (CITR). Abstract—It is well known that link adaptation techniques, when designed to track the channel variations, yield a higher network throughput. In this work, we investigate the throughput returns due to the employments of various combinations of adaptive modulation, adaptive coding, and adaptive power control in a fixed cellular broadband wireless access system incorporating the effects of shadowing, multipath fading, and multiple access interference. The system considered is Multipoint Multichannel Distribution System (MMDS) with carrier frequency 2.5 GHz. It is observed that among all the possible combinations, the combination of adaptive modulation and adaptive coding (without power control) is the most efficient type since the further employment of adaptive power control only adds a relatively small improvement in the throughput. The frequency of occurrence of different constellation sizes and code rates with the percentages of the successful and failing links, are reported as well in this study.