Channel quality estimation and rate adaptation for cellular mobile radio

We propose a technique to measure channel quality in terms of signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) for the transmission of signals over fading channels. The Euclidean distance (ED) metric, associated with the decoded information sequence or a suitable modification thereof, is used as a channel quality measure. Simulations show that the filtered or averaged metric is a reliable channel quality measure which remains consistent across different coded modulation schemes and at different mobile speeds. The average scaled ED metric can be mapped to the SINR per symbol. We propose the use of this SINR estimate for data rate adaptation, in addition to mobile assisted handoff (MAHO) and power control. We particularly focus on data rate adaptation and propose a set of coded modulation schemes which utilize the SINR estimate to adapt between modulations, thus improving the data throughput. Simulation results show that the proposed metric works well across the entire range of Dopplers to provide near-optimal rate adaptation to average SINR. This method of adaptation averages out short-term variations due to Rayleigh fading and adapts to the long-term effects such as shadowing. At low Dopplers, the metric can track Rayleigh fading and match the rate to a short-term average of the SINR, thus further increasing throughput.