Bit and Power Loading Approach for Broadband Multi-Antenna OFDM System

In this work, we have studied bit and power allocation strategies for multi-antenna assisted Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems and investigated the impact of different rates of bit and power allocations on various multi-antenna diversity schemes. It is observed that, if we cannot find the exact Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) thresholds due to different reasons, such as reduced Link Adaptation (LA) rate, Channel State Information (CSI) error, feedback delay etc., it is better to fix the transmit power across all sub-channels to guarantee the target Frame Error Rate (FER). Otherwise, it is possible to use adaptive power distribution to save power, which can be used for other purposes, or to increase the throughput of the system by transmitting higher number of bits. We also observed that in some scenarios and in some system conditions, some form of simultaneous bit and power allocations across OFDM sub-channels are required together for efficient exploitation of wireless channel.