Adaptive Modulation and Coding for Turbo Receivers in Space-Time BICM

Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) consists in adjusting the transmission parameters according to the channel state which affect the performance of the receiver. Practical implementation of the AMC is commonly done in scalar channels, where the signal to noise ratio characterizes sufficiently well the quality of the transmission. In this paper, we propose to use the AMC in matrix (MIMO) channels with the receiver employing the iterative (turbo) processing. Such solutions were not yet proposed in the literature due to the lack of appropriate performance evaluation tools. In the paper we employ the recently proposed method based on the so-called EXIT analysis, which was shown to predict accurately the performance of the turbo receivers. The numerical results obtained in the space-time bit-interleaved coded modulation MIMO transmission indicate that the throughput obtained exceeds considerably a non-adaptive transmission, and approaches the optimal water-filling solution.