MCS
The Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) is a value between 0 and 31 (5 bits) that is used to determine the modulation and coding scheme for a transport block. The MCS values could come from one of the three tables in the 3GPP standard. The Modulation Order () comes from which modulation scheme is used for the transport block as shown in the table below.
| Modulation | |
|---|---|
| QPSK | 2 |
| 16QAM | 4 |
| 64QAM | 6 |
| 256QAM | 8 |
Each of the indices then is translated to a value and a target coding rate which are used to calculate the number of bits that can be transmitted in one resource element. Calculating the Transport Block Size (TBS) is very complicated and is not in the scope of this lab, but figure below from this website shows how it is generally calculated.
