Adaptive Modulation Based on Nondata-Aided Error Vector Magnitude for Smart Systems in Smart Cities

A smart city involves big data transmission (BDT) between smart systems, which increases queue delays and leads to difficulty in enhancing the spectral efficiency. Adaptive modulation is an effective technique for enhancing data transmission rates in smart systems. However, traditional adaptive modulation approaches are not suitable for BDT in smart systems because the delays caused by the large amount of transmitted data lead to difficulty in evaluating the channel quality. In this article, we propose a nondata-aided error vector (NDA-EVM) that can be employed in adaptive modulation over wireless channels. The proposed NDA-EVM can be used to evaluate the channel quality and symbol error rate (SER), which reflect the quality of service (QoS) of the system. We formulated the relationship between the NDA-EVM and SER, which provides a basis for designing adaptive modulation techniques for smart systems. To address the low average spectrum efficiency (ASE) caused by BDT queue delays, an adaptive modulation strategy based on the finite-state Markov chain (FSMC) of the NDA-EVM [i.e., NDA-EVM adaptive modulation (NDA-EVM-AM)] was designed. This method simplifies the adaptive modulation algorithm for smart systems to search for the optimal transfer probability in the FSMC matrix based on two typical states: 1) the resident state and 2) transient state. Moreover, we proposed an analytical procedure to describe queuing behavior to analyze the performance of the NDA-EVM-AM algorithm for smart systems in smart cities. The performance is compared with that of a conventional adaptive modulation algorithm through simulations. The results show that compared with traditional adaptive modulation, NDA-EVM-AM obtains a lower packet loss rate and higher spectral efficiency for smart systems.