IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO.

5, MAY 1999

837

An Adaptive Modulation Scheme for Simultaneous

Voice and Data Transmission over Fading Channels
Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Member, IEEE, Xiaoyi Tang, and Andrea J. Goldsmith, Member, IEEE

AbstractWe propose a new adaptive modulation technique for

simultaneous voice and data transmission over fading channels
and study its performance. The proposed scheme takes advantage
of the time-varying nature of fading to dynamically allocate the
transmitted power between the inphase (I ) and quadrature (Q)
channels. It uses xed-rate binary phase shift keying (BPSK)
modulation on the Q channel for voice, and variable-rate M ary amplitude modulation (M -AM) on the I channel for data.
For favorable channel conditions, most of the power is allocated
to high rate data transmission on the I channel. The remaining
power is used to support the variable-power voice transmission on
the Q channel. As the channel degrades, the modulation gradually
reduces its data throughput and reallocates most of its available
power to ensure a continuous and satisfactory voice transmission.
The scheme is intended to provide a high average spectral
efciency for data communications while meeting the stringent
delay requirements imposed by voice. We present closed-form
expressions as well as numerical and simulation results for the
outage probability, average allocated power, achievable spectral
efciency, and average bit error rate (BER) for both voice and
data transmission over Nakagami-m fading channels. We also
discuss the features and advantages of the proposed scheme. For
example, in Rayleigh fading with an average signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR) of 20 dB, our scheme is able to transmit about 2 Bits/s/Hz
of data at an average BER of 1005 while sending about 1 Bit/s/Hz
of voice at an average BER of 1002 .
Index Terms Adaptive modulation techniques, integrated
voice and data systems, Nakagami fading.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE RADIO spectrum available for wireless communications is extremely scarce, while demand for mobile and
personal communications is growing at a rapid pace. Spectral
efciency is therefore of primary concern in the design of
future wireless communications systems. Furthermore, these
systems will have to support not only voice services but also
Manuscript received January 1997; revised January 1999. The work of
M.-S. Alouini was supported in part by a National Semiconductor Graduate
Fellowship Award and in part by the Ofce of Naval Research under Grant
NAV-5X-N149510861. The work of X. Tang was supported by a Summer
Undergraduate Fellowship (SURF) award. This is an expanded version of
work which was presented at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference
(VTC98), Ottawa, Ont., Canada, May 1998.
M.-S. Alouini was with the Communications Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125
USA. He is now with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA (e-mail:
alouini@ece.umn.edu).
X. Tang is with the Communications Group, Department of Electrical
Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA
(e-mail: xiaoyi@systems.caltech.edu.
A. J. Goldsmith is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford
University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA (e-mail: andrea@ee.stanford.edu).
Publisher Item Identier S 0733-8716(99)03084-X.

data services including facsimile, le transfer, e-mail, and

Internet access.
The need for spectrally efcient communication has recently
led to the development of adaptive transmission techniques.
These techniques take advantage of the time-varying nature
of wireless channels to vary the transmitted power level [1],
symbol rate [2], coding rate/scheme [3], constellation size
[4][8], or any combination of these parameters [9][14]. Their
goal is to improve the link average spectral efciency (
[Bits/s/Hz]), dened as the average transmitted data rate per
unit bandwidth for a specied average carrier-to-noise ratio
(CNR) and bit error rate (BER). Good performance of these
schemes requires accurate channel estimation at the receiver
and a reliable feedback path between the estimator and the
transmitter. Buffering of the input data may also be required,
since the outage probability of such schemes can be quite high,
especially for channels with low average CNR.
In general, voice transmission has low data rate requirements with real-time delay constraints, while data transmission demands higher rates with less stringent delay requirements. This suggests that xed-rate transmission combined
with power adaptation, where the transmitter adjusts its power
to maintain a constant CNR at the receiver, is well suited
to voice, while bursty variable-rate transmission, which maximizes average spectral efciency, is best suited to data
communication. In addition, voice and data typically have very
different BER requirements which must be incorporated into
their respective transmission schemes.
Considerable research efforts have been devoted in recent
years for the integration of voice and data for wireline [15] and
wireless communication systems [16][20]. For the latter systems these efforts focused on the development of a variety of
media access control (MAC) techniques and protocols such as
packet reservation multiple access (PRMA), idle signal multiple access for integrated services (I-ISMA), and dynamic time
division multiple access (D-TDMA). In this paper we propose
a new hybrid adaptive scheme which supports simultaneous
voice and data over fading channels.1 Contrary to the MAC
solutions, the proposed scheme offers a link layer solution
to the voice and data integration problem by designing the
transmitted signal modulation to support their respective delay,
data rate, and BER requirements. In particular, the proposed
adaptive scheme responds to the fading channel uctuations by
1 More generally the proposed scheme is capable of handling two independent information streams which are inherently different: i.e., they may be
generated by different sources and may also differ in their delay and BER
requirements.

07338716/99$10.00 1999 IEEE

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 1999

giving priority voice communication in one of the quadrature

channels, while devoting the other quadrature component to
variable-rate data communication. For bad channel conditions,
most of the transmitted power is allocated to ensure continuous
and satisfactory transmission of speech communications. As
the channel conditions improve, most of the transmitted power
is reallocated to high data rate transmission. Hence the goal
of the scheme is to provide a high average spectral efciency
for data communications while meeting the stringent delay
requirements of speech communications. The power allocation, as well as the constellations selection for the proposed
schemes constant-power, will be discussed in more detail in
Section III.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II describes the channel model. Section III presents the details
of the proposed scheme. The performance of this scheme, assuming perfect channel estimation and negligible time delay, is
analyzed in Section IV. In particular closed-form expressions
for the outage probability, average allocated power, achievable
spectral efciency, and average BER for both voice and data
transmission are derived. Numerical and simulation results that
allow discussion of the behavior of the proposed scheme are
also presented. Our conclusions are given in Section V.
II. CHANNEL MODEL
We consider a slowly varying at-fading channel changing
at a rate much slower than the symbol data rate, so the channel
remains roughly constant over hundreds of symbols. We
assume that the multipath fading environment is characterized
by the Nakagami- probability density function (PDF). Hence
the channel fading amplitude is given by [22, Eq. (11)]
(1)
is the average received power,
is the
where
, and
is the
Nakagami fading parameter
gamma function dened by [23, p. 942, Eq. (8.310.1)]

as special cases. Furthermore, the Nakagami- distribution

closely approximates the Nakagami- (Hoyt) [22, Eq. (59)] and
the Nakagami- (Rice) [22, Eq. (56)] distributions. Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, the Nakagami- distribution
often gives the best t to land-mobile [24][26], indoor-mobile
[27] multipath propagation, as well as scintillating ionospheric
satellite radio links [28][32].
III. PROPOSED MODULATION SCHEME
The proposed modulation scheme is a generalized and adaptive version of the unbalanced quadrature phase shift keying
(UQPSK) [33], [34, p. 622], which also offers the capability
of handling two different types of data. For instance, UQPSK
was used by the space shuttle and the tracking and data relay
satellite system (TDRSS) to communicate scientic data on
the inphase ( ) channel and operational/telemetry data on the
quadrature ( ) channel. In our case we propose to devote the
channel to data communications while transmitting voice over
channel. In contrast to UQPSK, where binary phase
the
shift keying (BPSK) modulation is used on both channels,
channel for voice and our scheme uses BPSK on the
ary amplitude modulation ( -AM) [34, p. 219], [35, p. 272]
[also known as -ary amplitude shift keying ( -ASK)]2 on
the channel for data. The proposed scheme suffers a spectral
-QAM constellations [5],
efciency penalty compared to
[8], [10]. However the scheme has the advantage of providing
a solution which lends itself to simplicity of design and
performance evaluation, as we will see next. In this section we
rst introduce the hybrid BPSK/ -AM modulation scheme.
We then present the details of the proposed adaptive scheme.
A. Hybrid BPSK/

-AM Modulation Scheme

A block diagram of the proposed hybrid BPSK/ -AM

modulation scheme is shown in Fig. 2. Following the form of
the UQPSK modulation [34, p. 622], the hybrid BPSK/ -AM
transmitted signal can be written as
(4)

(2)
,
Given the channel fading amplitude , a signal power
[Hz], and a noise power density
a signal bandwidth of
[W/Hz], let us dene the CNR
. By
of
using a standard transformation of random variables, it can be
shown that the CNR is distributed according to a gamma
, given by
distribution,

is the radian carrier frequency, and

and
are
where
,
the powers of the (data) and (voice) components of
and
correspond to the data and
respectively. In (4),
voice symbol streams, respectively; that is

(3)
where is the average CNR.
We use the Nakagami- distribution since it can represent
a range of multipath channels via the parameter [22], which
can be interpreted as the amount of fading on the channel: as
increases the amount of fading on the channel decreases.
In particular, the Nakagami- distribution includes the one, which corresponds to
sided Gaussian distribution (
)
worst-case fading) and the Rayleigh distribution (

(5)
is a unit power shaping pulse of duration
(the
where
). In (5)
(
,
signal bandwidth is hence
,
,
) are the Gray-mapped data symbols of the
(as depicted in Fig. 3) and
are the voice
data bits
bits.

2 We use here a symmetric

-AM constellation in which the signal points
are symmetrically located about the origin as shown in Fig. 1.

ALOUINI et al.: ADAPTIVE MODULATION SCHEME

Fig. 1. Gray mapping for the

839

M -AM constellations.

Fig. 2. Block diagram of the proposed adaptive system.

The channel introduces a multiplicative fading gain , a

phase shift , and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN)
with power spectral density
[W/Hz]. Hence
term
the received signal can be written as

where
and
are independent zero-mean Gaussian noise
. For uncoded data
samples with the same variance
and voice streams and independent hard decisions on the
and
channels (see Fig. 2), the conditional (conditioned on
) symbol error rate (SER), SER
, for data and BER,
, for voice are given by [34, p. 631]
and BER

(6)
erfc

SER
and
),
Assuming perfect channel estimation (
the received signal is rst coherently demodulated, then the
(data) signal is passed through an adaptive gain controller
signals are passed through matched
(AGC). Both and
) to form the
lters, then sampled (at times
and
given by
decision variables

BER

(9)

, and
are the data
where
and voice instantaneous CNR, respectively, and erfc is the
complementary error function dened by
erfc

(7)

erfc

(8)

(10)

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 1999

Fig. 3. Bit error rate versus received CNR for

M -AM.

The data symbol estimates are then passed through an ary Gray demapper to obtain an estimate of the source data bits
. Using the same procedure described in [36], [37, Ch. 5] to
obtain the exact BER of square -ary quadrature amplitude
modulation ( -QAM) with two-dimensional Gray coding, we
-AM modulation
derived exact BER expressions for the
with Gray coding as shown in Fig. 1. The procedure as well as
the exact BER expressions are given in the Appendix. These
exact BER expressions are plotted by the solid lines in Fig. 3
and are in excellent agreement with Monte Carlo simulated
BER values which are plotted by o on the same Fig. 3. For
large CNR, where the probability of symbol error is dominated
by the probability of adjacent symbol error, the BER with Gray
encoding can be approximated by [34, p. 210], [35, p. 265]
BER

SER

(11)

For comparison, the dash lines in Fig. 3 show the BER

approximation (11) for different values of . Note that (11)
lower bounds the exact BER expressions (as given in the
and the bound is tighter for
Appendix) for all values of
and high CNR. Using the Chernoff-bound on the erfc( )
low
function in (11), it can be shown that (11) is upper-bounded
for large CNR by
BER

SER
(12)

For comparison, the BER upper-bound (12) is plotted in Fig. 3

by star/solid lines for different values of
. Note that (12)
tightly upper bounds the exact BER expressions (as given in
and for BER
,
the Appendix) for all values of
which is the BER range of interest for data transmission.
Hence we will use this upper-bound (12) to derive closedform expressions which upper-bound the average data BER.
In addition, (12) has the advantage of being invertible in
the sense that it provides simple expressions for the data
switching thresholds, as shown in Section III-B.
B. Proposed Adaptive Scheme
We now describe the details of our proposed system shown
in Fig. 2. Assuming a perfect channel fading amplitude esti3
(equivalently, a perfect channel CNR estimation
mate
) and a peak power constraint of
[W], variable[W] is used on the BPSK of the
power
channel to ensure continuous xed-rate voice transmission
at the target voice BER BER i.e., the power allocated to
is set to just meet the voice BER requirement
voice
BER . The remaining available power
[W] is dynamically assigned on the
channel to support
-AM below the target data BER BER .
the (adaptive)
Specically, based on the channel CNR estimate and on the
3 Accurate channel fading estimation can be obtained via two techniques:
transparent tone in band (TTIB) or pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM).
The usage of these two techniques over fading channels is described in details
in [37, Sect. 10.3].

ALOUINI et al.: ADAPTIVE MODULATION SCHEME

841

v
d
Fig. 4. Outage probability for voice Pout and data Pout versus the average CNR .

available power
, the decision device at the receiver
to be transmitted on
selects the signal constellation size
the channel, congures the demodulator accordingly, and
informs the transmitter about that decision via the feedback
path. We now describe the power allocation for voice and
data as well as the constellation size assignment for data
transmission in more detail.
Our proposed modulation scheme uses the channel state
information at the transmitter to minimize its average power
consumption subject to the peak power constraint. Specically,
voice transmission is not attempted when the power
required to meet the target voice BER exceeds the peak power
constraint , and in this case a voice outage is declared.
Furthermore, since the voice has to operate at the target
BER , we see from (9) that the power allocated to voice
transmission must be set to

CNR required to achieve the target BER using M -AM over

an AWGN channel. Specically from (12) we have
BER
(14)
If during voice transmission the remaining available power
is not able to support BPSK on the
channel, then no data is transmitted and a data outage is
declared. Hence the power allocated to data transmission can
be written as

equivalently
otherwise.
(15)

(or equivalently

otherwise
(13)
erfc
BER
and erfc
denotes the
where
inverse complementary error function. For data the scheme
responds to the instantaneous channel CNR uctuation by
varying its constellation size as follows. The data CNR range
fading regions, and the constellation
is divided into
(where is the number of bits per
-AM
size
).
symbol) is assigned to the th region (
When the received data CNR is estimated to be in the th
is transmitted. The region
region, the constellation size
are set to the
boundaries (or switching thresholds)

IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

In this section we analyze the performance of the proposed
scheme and we present both numerical and simulation results
which are in perfect agreement, as can be seen in Figs. 411.
All our numerical and simulation results are plotted as a
for different values of the
function of the average CNR
and for different maximum
Nakagami fading parameter
constellation sizes (levels). Note that all these numerical and
simulation results assume a target uncoded voice BER, BER ,
of 10 , and a target uncoded data BER, BER of 10 . We
used these values to speed up our simulations, however our
analytic derivations apply to any set of BER requirements.

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 1999

Fig. 5. Average power allocation for voice hPv i=P and data hPd i=P versus the average CNR .

We use the MATLAB Communication Toolbox for our

computer simulations. The powers allocated for voice and
data as well as the constellation size for data transmission
are determined at each symbol time according to the fading
level, as explained in Section III. We assume perfect channel
estimation,4 coherent phase detection at the receiver, and Gray
coding for bit mapping on the -AM constellations, as shown
in Fig. 1. All our simulations use a 4 level modem which is
able to support up to 16-AM modulation for data transmission.

Eq. (8.350.2)]
(18)
For

positive integers [23, p. 949, Eq. (8.352.2)],

(19)

where

denotes the

degree polynomial dened by

(20)

A. Outage Probability
Since no voice is sent when the required power
exceeds , the voice transmission suffers an outage probability
of

Thus if we restrict ourselves to integer values of

be expressed as

, (17) can

(16)
Substituting (3) in (16), then using [23, p. 364, Eq. (3.381.3)],
as
we can express

(21)
For the special case of the Rayleigh fading channel (
(21) reduces to

),
(22)

(17)
is the complementary incomplete
where
gamma function (or Pryms function) dened by [23, p. 949,
4 We do not address in this paper the effect of channel estimation errors.
However, the analytical tools used in [8], [38], and [39] to characterize the
effect of channel estimation errors and feedback delay on adaptive M -QAM
modulations can be used to study the performance of our proposed hybrid
scheme under imperfect channel estimate conditions.

is insufSince no data is sent when the available power

cient to support BPSK on the channel, data transmission
of
suffers an outage probability

(23)

ALOUINI et al.: ADAPTIVE MODULATION SCHEME

843

Fig. 6. Overall normalized average power hP i=P allocated to both voice and data versus the average CNR .

where
is the rst data switching threshold. If we restrict
ourselves to integer values of , (23) can be expressed as

If we restrict ourselves to integer values of

be expressed as

(24)
Hence for the special case of the Rayleigh fading channel
), (24) reduces to
(

, (26) can

(27)
For

we have [23, p. 951, Eq. (8.359.1)]

(28)

(25)
and
for voice
Fig. 4 shows the outage probability
and data transmission, respectively. In the high average CNR
region (i.e., higher than 4 dB for voice and higher than 9 dB
for data), the higher the average CNR, the lower the outage
probability, as expected. In addition, the scheme meets the
more stringent delay requirements of voice since for a xed
data suffers a higher outage probability than voice at all
average CNRs. Although these outage curves appear simple
and intuitive, they will in fact be crucial to explain many of
our subsequent performance results.

where
dened as

is the exponential-integral of rst order function

(29)
Thus for the special case of the Rayleigh fading channel
), using (28) in (26) we obtain
(
(30)
The normalized average power allocated for data transmission
is given by

B. Average Power Allocation

The normalized average power allocated for voice transis given by
mission

(26)

(31)

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 1999

Fig. 7. Achievable spectral efciency for voice hRv i=W and data hRd i=W versus the average CNR : (a) m = 1, (b) m = 2, and (c) m = 4.

If we restrict ourselves to integer values of

be expressed as

, (31) can

(32)
For the particular case of the Rayleigh fading channel (
using (28) in (31) we get

),

(33)
Fig. 5 shows in dash lines the normalized average power
. This gure also
allocated for voice transmission
displays in solid lines the normalized average power allocated
. The overall normalized average
for data transmission,
is shown in Fig. 6. The
power
behavior of the curves in Fig. V, which varies in the different
regions of average CNR, can be explained by the outage
curves in Fig. 4. In particular, we see in Fig. 4 that at low s
both voice and data suffer a large outage probability. Hence,
since there is no transmission during outage, the corresponding
power consumptions in Figs. 5 and 6 are low. Consider now
dB).
the region of extremely low average CNR (i.e.,
in this region, as
increases
Observe that for a xed
(i.e., the amount of fading decreases) the power consumption
for voice decreases. This can be explained by the following
argument. At these extremely low values of note from Fig. 4
that the outage probability for voice is essentially the same for
values. However, when voice transmission is possible
all

channels with a higher amount of fading will require more

power to maintain a constant voice CNR . Thus, in this
region power consumption for voice increases relative to the
amount of fading. In the medium CNR region (i.e., 2.5 dB
dB), we see that a larger value of
corresponds
to a larger power consumption for voice and a smaller one for
data. This can be explained by observing that in Fig. 4 the data
outage probability in this region is essentially independent of
but the voice outage probability decreases as
increases.
Thus, as increases, we are transmitting voice more often and
therefore we must allocate a larger percentage of our power
to voice. In the region of high average CNR (i.e., 12.5 dB
), voice outage probability is small, and since the channel
is quite good, a small fraction of the total power is needed for
the voice transmission. Thus most of the power is allocated to
(i.e., a
data transmission. In this favorable region a large
small amount of fading) implies that less power is needed for
voice transmission and therefore more power can be allocated
to high rate -ary data transmission.
C. Achievable Spectral Efciency
The average link spectral efciency for voice transmission
is given by

(34)
When

is restricted to integer values (34) may be written as

(35)

ALOUINI et al.: ADAPTIVE MODULATION SCHEME

845

which reduces to
(36)
). The average
for the special Rayleigh fading case (
is just
link spectral efciency for data transmission
) associated with the
the sum of the data rates (
regions, weighted by the probability
individual

explained by the following argument. Channels with a small

exhibit signicant fading and a corresponding wide range
will have most of
of CNR values. Channels with a large
their CNR concentrated around the average CNR which is
small in the low average CNR region. Hence channels with a
smaller fading parameter will have a slightly higher spectral
efciency since the larger CNR uctuation results in a lower
probability of outage in this low average CNR region (as can
be seen in Fig. 4).
D. Average Bit Error Rate

that the data CNR

falls in the th fading region

(37)

s can be expressed using [23, p. 364, Eq.

where the
(3.381.3)] as

Voice transmission is always operating at the target BER,

BER . On the other hand, since the choice of the constellation
size for data transmission is done in a conservative fashion,
data is transmitted at an average BER, BER smaller than
BER . This average BER can be computed exactly as the ratio
of the average number of bits in error over the total average
number of transmitted bits
BER
BER

(41)

(38)
in the most general case and may be written as
where
(39)
when is restricted to integer values. For the Rayleigh fading
case (39) reduces to
(40)
The dashed lines in Fig. 7 show the average spectral ef. This gure also
ciency for voice transmission
shows the average spectral efciency for data transmission
for different maximum constellation sizes. For high
average CNRs (above 15 dB) the scheme provides a higher
spectral efciency for data then for voice and can therefore
meet the higher data rate requirements for data transmission.
dened as
The overall average spectral efciency
the sum of the voice and data average spectral efciencies
), is shown in Fig. 8. At
(i.e.,
corresponds to a large overall
high average CNR a large
average spectral efciency for voice and data. However, at low
average CNR (i.e., less than 4 dB for voice and less than 10
corresponds to a low overall average
dB for data) a large
spectral efciency. This may seem surprising at rst but can be

BER

BER

(42)

It can be shown using (3) and (12) in (42) that BER is

upper-bounded as shown in (43) at the bottom of the page
where

When

is restricted to integer values these bounds become

BER

BER
(44)

BER

BER

(43)

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IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 1999

Fig. 8. Overall spectral efciency hRi=W versus the average CNR : (a) m = 1, (b) m = 2, and (c) m = 4.

which reduces in the Rayleigh case (

) to

BER

BER

(45)

Fig. 9 shows the average BER for both voice and data,
for different maximum constellation sizes or levels. Note that
voice transmission is always operating at the target BER,
BER . On the other hand, data is transmitted at an average
BER BER smaller than the target BER , as expected
from our conservative choice of constellation size. Since
data transmission uses the largest constellation often when
the average CNR is high, the average BER prediction as
increases becomes dominated by the BER performance of that
constellation. In addition, at high average CNR as increases
the average BER for data decreases, as one might expect.
dB) the average
However, at low average CNR (i.e.,
BER for data actually increases as increases. This behavior
may seem surprising at rst, but can be explained by the fact
dB a large implies that only a small amount
that for
of power is allocated to data transmission, as can be seen in
Fig. 5. Hence since data can only use a small fraction of the
power, its BER increases.
)
We show the simulated BER for Rayleigh fading (
in Figs. 10 and 11,
and for Nakagami fading with
respectively. The BER simulation results for voice transmission in these gures are in perfect agreement with the
analytical calculations. However, the simulated BERs for data

transmission are slightly lower than the analytical calculations

since the latter are based on the upper-bound (12) of the
BER performance of -AM with Gray coding. The fact that
(see Fig. 3) combined
this bound is tighter (12) for lower
with the fact that the scheme often uses the smallest available
constellation at low average CNRs explains why the overall
average BER upper-bound for data transmission is tighter at
low average CNRs.
V. CONCLUSION
We have proposed an adaptive modulation scheme which
offers a simple and energy-efcient solution to voice and
data integration over fading channels. The proposed design
is intended to provide the user with a high average spectral
efciency for data communications while meeting the stringent
delay requirements imposed by voice. For favorable channel conditions, most of the power is allocated to high rate
data transmission by using -AM with a large constellation
size. As the channel degrades, the modem reduces its data
throughput and reallocates most of its available power to
ensure a continuous and satisfactory voice transmission. We
evaluated the performance of our proposed scheme in terms
of outage probability, average allocated power, achievable
spectral efciency, and average BER for both voice and data
transmission.
Although the design and analyses for our proposed scheme
is quite simple, this simplicity comes at the expense of a spectral efciency penalty compared to -QAM constellations [5],
[8], [10]. We are currently looking at other possibilities of
improving the spectral efciency of the proposed scheme. One

ALOUINI et al.: ADAPTIVE MODULATION SCHEME

Fig. 9. Average BER for voice hBERv i and data hBERd i versus the average CNR : (a) m = 1, (b) m = 2, and (c) m = 4.

Fig. 10.

Average BER for voice hBERv i and data hBERd i versus the average CNR for Rayleigh fading (m = 1).

847

848

Fig. 11.

IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 17, NO. 5, MAY 1999

Average BER for voice hBERv i and data hBERd i versus the average CNR for Nakagami fading (m = 2).

possibility is to multiplex the voice and data bit streams and

-QAM constellations. Besides
to use adaptive symmetric
having several parameter choices to optimize, this multiplexing
scheme will exhibit some performance and complexity tradeoffs relative to our proposed technique. Another area of further
study is unequal error protection codes which can be used in
conjunction with adaptive modulation to achieve different levels of error protection while improving the throughput of data
communication and further reducing the outage probability of
voice. Design and performance evaluation of multiresolution
adaptive modulations where the constellation of voice and
data are superimposed on the top of one another would also
be another interesting future research direction. Finally, the
use of a speech activity detector (SAD), which segments a
conversation speech into talkspurts and silences [40], can also
improve the overall spectral efciency. A SAD can be used
in conjunction with an adaptive multimode modem to send
adaptive -QAM [8], [10] for data transmission during the
channel,
silences when voice is not transmitted on the
and our proposed scheme for simultaneous voice and data
transmission can be used during the talkspurts.
APPENDIX
EXACT BER EXPRESSIONS FOR
-AM OVER AN AWGN CHANNEL
In this Appendix we derive the exact BER expression for
4-AM with Gray coding over an AWGN channel, and give the
exact BER expressions for 8-AM and 16-AM.
For 4-AM the four symbols are symmetrically distributed
about zero with equal distance between two adjacent symbols

as shown in Fig. 1. In Fig. 1, is the amplitude level,

is
is the distance between two
the symbol duration,
adjacent symbols, and the dashed vertical lines represent the
decision boundaries. Since we consider an AWGN channel
, the noise is
with a noise power spectral density of
normally distributed with zero mean and variance
.
Consider rst the left bit of each 4-AM symbol, as shown in
Fig. 1. A bit error occurs when the bit 1, corrupted by noise,
falls into the boundaries of bit 0 or vice versa. For example,
the left bit of the symbol 10, i.e., 1, will be interpreted 0 when
. Hence its probability of error
the noise is larger than
is given by
(46)
is the Gaussian -function which is related to the
where
error complementary function as dened in (10) by
erfc

(47)

, and
.
Similarly,
Assuming each of the four symbols has equal probability, the
is
error probability of the left bit

(48)
Consider now the right bit of each 4-AM symbol as shown in
Fig. 1. Following the same procedure it can be shown that its

ALOUINI et al.: ADAPTIVE MODULATION SCHEME

probability of error

849

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

is given by
(49)

Hence the average BER for 4-AM is given by

BER -

The authors would like to thank Dr. M. K. Simon of

the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA,
for early discussions regarding unbalanced QPSK and its
applications. They would also like to thank the anonymous
reviewers for their valuable comments and for the suggested
alternative method of multiplexing voice and data bits.

(50)
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On the other hand the average power per symbol is

(51)
Thus

where
is the signal bandwidth. The exact BER
of 4-AM can hence be rewritten in terms of average CNR,
, as
BER (52)
The exact BER expressions for 8-AM and 16-AM can be
calculated in a similar way and are given by
BER -

(53)
BER -

(54)

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Mohamed-Slim Alouini (S94M99) was born

in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Dipl. Ing.
degree from the Ecole Nationale Sup rieure des
e
T l communications (TELECOM), Paris, France,
ee
and the Dipl me dEtudes Approfondies (DEA)
o
degree in electronics from the University of Pierre
& Marie Curie (Paris VI), Paris, France, both
in 1993. He received the M.S.E.E. degree from
the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia
Tech), Atlanta, in 1995, and the Ph.D. degree in
electrical engineering from the California Institute
of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, in 1998.
While completing the DEA thesis, he worked with the optical submarine
systems research group of the French National Center of Telecommunications
(CNET-Paris B) on the development of future transatlantic optical links.
While at Georgia Tech, he conducted research in the area of Ka -band satellite
channel characterization and modeling. From June to August 1998, he was a
postdoctoral fellow with the Communications Group at Caltech, carrying out
research on adaptive modulation techniques and on CDMA communications.
He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University
of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in September 1998, where his current research
interests include statistical modeling of multipath fading channels, adaptive
modulation techniques, diversity systems, and digital communication over
fading channels.
Dr. Alouini is the recipient of a National Semiconductor Graduate
Fellowship Award.

Xiaoyi Tang will receive the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, in June 1999.
Currently, he is an Undergraduate Research Assistant with the Communications group at Caltech.

Andrea J. Goldsmith (S94M95) received the

B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in
1986, 1991, and 1994, respectively.
From 1986 to 1990, she was with Maxim Technologies, where she worked on packet radio and
satellite communication systems, and from 1991 to
1992, she was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, where
she worked on microcell modeling and channel estimation. She was an Assistant Professor of electrical
engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, from 19941998, and is currently an Assistant Professor of
electrical engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Her research
includes work in capacity of wireless channels, wireless communication
theory, adaptive modulation and coding, joint source and channel coding,
and resource allocation in cellular systems.
Dr. Goldsmith is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER
Development Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, two National
Semiconductor Faculty Development Awards, an IBM Graduate Fellowship,
and the David Griep Memorial Prize from the University of California,
Berkeley. She is an Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS
and the IEEE PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE.