Fast Approximation Algorithms for Symmetric Constellation Subset Selection

Adaptive-modulation transceivers have been widely used in wireless communications nowadays. The tradeoff between symbol error rate and data rate can be tuned by adjusting the constellation size. In this paper, we propose a constellation subset selection (CSS) approach and design the novel efficient approximation algorithms to tackle the CSS problems. The approximation ratios for these algorithms are derived. The theoretical studies on how to control the target symbol error rate by selecting an appropriate parameter K are also presented. Monte Carlo simulation results show that our CSS scheme really can reach below the target error probability.