Abstract
Adaptive modulation and diversity combining represent very important adaptive solutions for the future generations of communication systems. In order to improve the performance and the efficiency of wireless communication systems these two techniques have been recently used jointly in new schemes named joint adaptive modulation and diversity combining (JAMDC) schemes. Considering the problem of finding low-complexity, bandwidth-efficient, and processing-power efficient transmission schemes for a downlink scenario and capitalizing on one of these recently proposed JAMDC schemes, we propose and analyze in this paper two fully joint adaptive modulation, diversity combining, and power control (FJAMDC) schemes. More specifically, the modulation constellation size, the number of combined diversity paths, and the needed power level are jointly determined to achieve the highest spectral efficiency with the lowest possible combining complexity, given the fading channel conditions and the required error rate performance. Selected numerical examples show that the newly proposed schemes considerably increase the spectral efficiency with a slight increase in the average number of combined path for the low signal to noise ratio (SNR) range while maintaining compliance with the bit error rate (BER) performance and a low radiated power which yields to a substantial decrease in interference to co-existing systems/users.