Code design for adaptive coding and modulation indicator in broadcast systems

In this paper, we address the coding problem for adaptive coding and modulator indicators in communication systems where users are divided into several classes according to their channel quality. Two novel methods are described to construct codebooks with variable length codewords forsuch an application. The proposed constructions satisfy all constraints of the system model, showing considerable gain in both the maximal and average length of codebook with respect to the current state of the art. The methodology includes a systematic way for constructing variable length codebooks where codewords are not uniformly distributed in the space, and thus, some codewords are more protected than others. The proposed construction can be easily adapted, by zero padding, to obtain a fixed block‐length code, with length equal to the maximal length of the designed variable‐length code but still smaller than that of the best state‐of‐the‐art code. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.