Adaptive modulation and coding techniques in MUOS fading/scintillation environments

In this paper, adaptive modulation and coding structures are presented that are appropriate for the MUOS environment. The proposed approach adaptively controls the modulation format, FEC coding rate, transmission power and even possibly bandwidth spreading gain in response to changing channel conditions in an attempt to optimize throughput while maintaining acceptable error rate performance. Being able to estimate and then predict the channel is vital to the system performance. Channel prediction algorithms; have been developed and the advantages of the adaptive modulation/coding techniques are presented together with implementation issues.