Communication performance prediction and link adaptation based on a statistical radio channel model

This thesis seeks to develop a robust semi-analytical performance prediction method for an advanced iterative receiver that processes spatially multiplexed signals that have propagated through frequency-selective receive correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication channels. In a change of perspective, the proposed performance prediction methods are applied at the transmitter, which seeks to attain a target frame error rate (FER) either by adaptive power control or by adaptive modulation and coding (AMC). The performance prediction scheme utilises the statistical properties of the channel – namely noise variance, number of separable propagation paths and the eigenvalues of the receive correlation matrix – to predict the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the output of a frequency domain soft interference cancellation minimum mean square error equaliser. The SINR distribution is used to derive the distribution of the variance of the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) at the output of a soft symbol-to-bit demapper. Mutual information transfer charts establish a bijective relationship between the variance of the LLRs and mutual information. A 3rd Generation Partnership Project compliant turbo code is assumed. Since the decoder operates independently from the channel, its extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts can be simulated in advance. By utilising the approximate LLR variance distribution of the demapped equaliser output, it is possible to evaluate the probability of an intersection between an equaliser chart associated with a random channel realisation and a fixed decoder chart. This probability provides the FER. Since the proposed performance prediction method does not require any instantaneous channel state information, it can be applied at the transmitter side as a robust link adaptation scheme. In adaptive transmission power control, the modulation order and code rate are fixed. By iteratively adjusting transmission power, the transmitter attempts to find an equaliser output LLR variance distribution that reaches a specified target FER. In AMC, transmission power is fixed. The equaliser output's LLR variance distribution is determined by the modulation order, while the decoder chart's position is determined by the code rate. The transmitter iteratively adjusts the code rate and attempts to find a modulation order and code rate pairing that reaches the target FER. For vertically encoded spatially multiplexed systems, the adaptive transmission power control and AMC schemes are complemented by adaptive repeat redundancy and incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) techniques, respectively.