Link adaptation is important to guarantee robust and reliable wireless communications with- out wasting valuable radio resources. This technique has become more feasible with the recent appearance of Software Defined Radios (SDRs), which allow easy reconfiguration of their parameters via software. As the environment changes over time, the transmitter needs to be able to effectively estimate its performance under different radio input parameters to be able to find a close to optimal solution. In most wireless communications, an equalizer is implemented at the receiver to estimate the channel impulse response. This estimate can be fed back to the transmitter via a feedback channel, which can in turn help generate a sub-optimal transmission solution for the current situation. In this thesis, a link adaptation method is proposed that uses Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in conjunction with blind channel estimation. With the use of OFDM, it can be assumed that the frequency fading at each subcarrier is approximately flat. In addition, under the assumption that the channel is quasi-stationary, the Bit Error Rate (BER) at each subcarrier can be estimated by using the well-known BER formulas for an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. However, the effect of imperfect channel estimation must also be taken into account. A novel OFDM blind channel estimator is developed. Finally, both simulations and real over-the-air results are presented. / Master of Science

In aeronautical telemetry, the multipath interference usually causes significant performance degradation. As the bit rate of telemetry systems increases, the impairments of multipath interference are more serious. The constant modulus algorithm (CMA) blind equalizer is effective to mitigate the impairments of multipath interference. The CMA adapts the equalizer coefficients to minimize the deviation of the signal envelope from a constant level. This paper presents the performances of the CMA blind equalizer applied for PCM-FM, PCM-BPSK, SOQPSK-TG and ARTM CPM in aeronautical telemetry.