Patent ID: 8514957

Claim:
A method for increasing spectral efficiency in a communication system, the communication system including at least one mobile station, the communication system capable of transmitting messages encoded according to a plurality of available modulation coding schemes, each modulation coding scheme having a modulation scheme and an effective coding rate, the available modulation coding schemes indexed according to increasing complexity, the effective coding rate being a coding rate of an initial transmission of an incremental redundancy encoded message, the method comprising: determining a signal-to-interference ratio sufficient to satisfy a predetermined frame error rate received from the mobile station for a single transmission; determining a first modulation coding scheme and a corresponding amount of transmissions sufficient to satisfy the predetermined frame error rate at the signal-to-interference ratio using the first modulation coding scheme, the first modulation coding scheme having a higher effective coding rate than a second modulation coding scheme, the second modulation coding scheme being sufficient to satisfy the predetermined frame error rate at the signal-to-interference ratio in the single transmission; and transmitting a message through the communication system using hybrid automatic repeat request, the message encoded according to the first modulation coding scheme.