Radio communication apparatus with adaptive modulation and coding

A base station (20) has a time correlation calculating unit (25) for estimating a variation-with-time characteristic of radio link quality using radio downlink quality information reported by a mobile station (10), a target error rate setting unit (26) for changing over a target error rate adaptively using this variation-with-time characteristic, and an MCS decision unit (23) for deciding a modulation scheme and/or encoding rate, in such a manner that packet error rate becomes equal to the target error rate, using the radio link quality information as well as reception success/failure information reported by the mobile station (10). The base station (20) transmits a packet based upon the modulation scheme and/or encoding rate decided.