Abstract
This letter investigates the effect of feedback error on the performance of the joint adaptive modulation and diversity combining (AMDC) scheme which was previously studied with an assumption of error-free feedback channels. We also propose to utilize adaptive diversity to compensate for the performance degradation due to feedback error. We accurately quantify the performance of the joint AMDC scheme in the presence of feedback error, in terms of the average number of combined paths, the average spectral efficiency, and the average bit error rate. Selected numerical examples are presented and discussed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed feedback error compensation strategy with adaptive combining. It is observed that the proposed compensation strategy can offer considerable error performance improvement with little loss in processing power and spectral efficiency in comparison with the no compensation case.