COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MODULATION SCHEMES USING ADAPTIVE EQUALIZATION AS FADING MITIGATION TECHNIQUE

Inter-symbol interference (ISI) due to multipath fading is a vital problem in high-speed wireless communication which restricts communication quality and capacity. Therefore, in addition to choosing a fading mitigation technique, it is also important to strategically select a modulation scheme for effective data transmission. Recent literature review on wireless standards, such as 3G and 4G indicates that QAM and QPSK are suitable choices for data transmission. In this paper, a comparative analysis on selected modulation schemes is performed in a fading environment. The mitigation of fading is done using adaptive equalization technique. Also, we show that the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is an important parameter to choose. It is observed that, even when an adaptive equalizer is used at the receiver, a very low SNR gives very high symbol error rate (SER). We derive some important conclusions from our simulation result: QPSK shows minimum SER, whereas 256-PSK and 256-PAM perform worse. Given its spectral efficiency and a low SER, the best choice is 256- QAM