Maximum Rate Scheduling With Adaptive Modulation in Mixed Impulsive Noise and Additive White Gaussian Noise Environments

This article proposes an opportunistic scheduling scheme based on adaptive modulation for users in a mixed noise environment, where some users are under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and other users are exposed to impulsive noise. Unlike the scenario, where all the users are in an AWGN environment, the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scheduler does not provide the maximum capacity if users are in a mixed noise environment. In the proposed scheduling scheme, called maximum rate scheduler, the user with the highest rate (or highest modulation order), instead of highest SNR, is selected. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduling scheme, the analyses of average spectral efficiency, outage probability and system capacity are provided along with a simple calculation of SNR thresholds for adaptive modulation in an impulsive noise environment satisfying target symbol error rate (SER). Simulation results illustrate that system capacity with the proposed scheduling given target SER = 10−2 and the average spectral efficiency are improved by 156% and 124%, respectively, at SNR = 5 dB when a strong impulsive noise is present.