Multiuser bit-interleaved coded OFDM with limited feedback information

In wireless access systems, there has been much interest in enhancing the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in a frequency selective fading channel. If the channel is static and is perfectly known to both the transmitter and the receiver, the water-filling technique with adaptive modulation is known to be optimal [1]. However, for OFDM systems, this requires intensive traffic overheads for reporting channel side information on all subcarriers to the transmitter. In this paper, we propose an adaptive modulation and coding scheme for bit-interleaved coded OFDM (BIC-OFDM) for downlink packet transmissions with reduced feedback information. To minimize the feedback information, we employ a rate adaptation method based on the OFDM symbol rather than on each subcarrier. To illustrate the performance gap between the optimal water-filling and the proposed scheme, we will compare cutoff rates for both schemes. It is shown that the loss is less than 2dB while the proposed scheme significantly reduces the feedback payloads. Also, the OFDM system in multiuser environment with subcarrier grouping is considered. It is shown that by exploiting multiuser diversity the throughput of the proposed scheme approaches the channel outage capacity as the number of users and the number of subcarrier groups increase.