Link adaptation based on repetition coding for mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access systems

Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) suffers from inter-carrier interference (ICI) since it adopts orthogonal frequency division multiplexing in physical layer. This study applies a repetition coding scheme, which encodes the same data on a subcarrier pair, to the hierarchical modulation to suppress the ICI and thus the inter-layer interference. Consequently, the proposed method mitigates the effects of fading and interference and provides a finer granularity of modulation order for link adaptation. Besides, the repetition coding scheme is also applied to a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol to recover error packets because of poor channel conditions. The proposed method incorporates the ICI cancellation into the conventional incremental redundancy HARQ and automatically activates the cancellation of ICI without Doppler shift/mobility estimation. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms outperform the conventional schemes in time-varying Rayleigh fading channels, especially in high-mobility environments.