Utility-Based QAM Adaptation with Diversity and Ambiguous CSI under Energy Constraints

Adaptive M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) with subset diversity is a way to cope with the quality of service variations in small and large-scale fading channels. We consider a pilot-assisted slow adaptive modulation (SAM) technique that adapts the constellation size and the pilots energy to slow variations of the channel due to shadowing. The SAM technique is less complex and requires a lower feedback rate with respect to fast adaptive modulation techniques. We present an analytical framework to evaluate the bit-error probability for pilot-asisted slow adaptive QAM with subset diversity and imperfect channel state information (CSI) together with a utility-based approach to SAM. It accounts for the imperfect CSI, and is related to the game-theoretic approach, in which a particular strategy (the pilots energy and the constellation signaling) is chosen as a response to the set of possible channel conditions.