Adaptive Modulation and Coding for MIMO Systems with V-BLAST Detection

There have been great efforts to study the adaptive MIMO systems, while all of them concentrate on the systems without channel coding. This paper presents a new adaptive V-BLAST scheme adopting turbo-codes as the channel coding. This new scheme divides the optimization problem into two steps which simplifies the design greatly. Also, through this two-step method, we derive two algorithms for fixed rate and variable rate applications respectively. We combine the bit and power allocation with antenna selection effectively with very low complexity through a new ordering scheme and derive a simplified power allocation algorithm. For adaptive coding, we propose a new metric - Equivalent Capacity SNR, which can indicate the overall channel condition, to select the proper coding scheme. Simulation results show that the algorithms for fixed rate and variable rate both provide very good throughput performance with low complexity and less feedback information.