In a MIMO delay spread (OFDM) system or a MIMO single carrier (non-OFDM) system wherein a transmitter transmits signals to a receiver through multipath fading channels, an equivalent frequency-domain MIMO multipath channel matrix is used to estimate the maximum mutual information regarding the relationship between transmitted signals and received signals. It is possible to compute the upper bound of the maximum mutual information at least based on the total energy of all resolvable paths in the fading channels. The upper bound or the changes in the upper bound can be used to adjust the transmission parameters used in data transmission. The transmission parameters include the modulation order in the modulation process, the code rate and the puncturing rate.