Adaptive turbo-coded modulation for flat-fading channels

We consider a turbo-coded system employed on a flat-fading channel where the transmitter and receiver adapt the encoder, decoder, modulation scheme, and transmit power to the state of the channel. Assuming instantaneous and error-free channel gain and phase knowledge at the transmitter and the receiver, we determine the optimal adaptation strategy that maximizes the throughput of this system, while achieving a given bit-error rate under an average power constraint. Our optimized adaptive modulation strategy is based on an extensive set of existing turbo-coded modulation schemes. We find that adapting both the turbo encoder (rate) and the transmit power can achieve performance within 3 dB of the fading channel capacity.