method to perform link adaptation at the radio interfaces of an enhanced packet data cellular network handling several modulation and coding schemes for maximizing data throughput . in a preliminary off - line step the system behavior , in terms of net throughput of the various available mcss , is simulated for different c / i conditions . from the simulation two sets of tables are obtained , each table including upgrade and downgrade thresholds expressed in terms of block error rate . thresholds correspond to switching points from an mcs to the two available mcss having the immediate less or more protection . the two sets of tables are referred to higher or lower diversity rf environments and are further specialized for taking into account egprs type ii hybrid arq , namely incremental redundancy . during transmission the transmitted blocks are checked for fec and the results are sent to the network . the network continuously updates bler using exponential smoothing . in order to achieve the correct time response , in spite of that rlc blocks can be received or not , a reliability filter is provided whose output is used to decide the weight between the new and old measurements to make the bler filter impulse response exponentially decreasing with time . the ir efficiency is tested for each incoming block and an indicative variable ir_status is filtered using the same approach used for bler . each actual threshold of bler to be used in link adaptation is obtained by a linear interpolation between the tabulated threshold without ir and with perfect ir , both weighed with filtered ir_status . filtered bler is then compared with said interpolated thresholds for testing the incoming of a mcs switching condition . power control pursues the goal of maintaining constant qos peak throughput per time slot .