MCM is an efficient transmission technique for wireless

communication system as it divides the original

frequency band into several narrow bands, and making
the system less sensitive to wide-band impulse noise
and fast channel fades as compared to the single
carrier modulation technique. Some of the advantages
are given for MCM.
In multicarrier modulation (MCM), a transmitted
bitstream is divided into many different substreams,
which are to be sent in parallel over many subchannels.
The parallel subchannels are typically orthogonal under
ideal conditions for propagation.
The data rate on each of the subcarriers is much lower than
the total data rate.
The bandwidth of subchannels is usually much less than the
coherence bandwidth of the wireless channel, so that the
ISI on each subchannel is small.
MCM can be efficiently implemented digitally using the FFT
(Fast Fourier Transform) techniques, yielding the so-called
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).
Digital audio and video broadcasting and Mobile wireless
broadband communications.
Wireless local area networks (WLAN) - IEEE802.11a, g;
Fixed wireless broadband services.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
employs MCM technique, and received considerable
attention due to the need for high speed data
transmission.
Orthogonal subcarriers allow their spectrums to
overlap which achieves the high spectral efficiency.
As long as the subcarriers preserve their orthogonality,
adjacent subcarriers do not interfere with each other.
Nowadays, OFDM has been accepted as the standard in
several wired line and wireless applications such as the
European Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), Digital
Video Broadcasting (DVB) and WiMAX

The channel bandwidth is divided into N subchannels.
The data bits assigned to each subchannel are mapped
onto QAM constellation to form a complex sample, and
then modulated onto orthogonal sub-carriers using
Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) to generate
samples for transmission through the channel.
A cyclic prefix that is 25% of each sample is circularly
wrapped to that symbol.
At the receiver the cyclic prefix samples are discarded
and remaining samples are subjected to FFT. The
resulting signal is demodulated to recover the original
data bits.

Wavelet packets offer a richer signal analysis than wavelet
decomposition of a signal,shows a wavelet packet tree, which
allows focusing on special parts in time-frequency domain in a more
detailed way than is possible with ordinary wavelet transform.
A wavelet packet is a generalization of wavelets in that each octave
frequency band of the wavelet spectrum is further subdivided into
finer frequency bands by using the two-scale relations repeatedly.
The translates of each of these wavelet packets form an orthogonal
basis. We can decompose a signal into many wavelet packet
components.
A signal maybe represented by a selected set of wavelet packets
without using every wavelet packet for a given level of resolution.
The good frequency characteristics and greater flexibility offered by
wavelet packet transform make it an attractive choice for a high
data rate OFDM transceiver in fading channel conditions.