An Efficient Link Perfomance Estimation Technique for Mimo-ofdm Systems

Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is a powerful technique to enhance the link performance by adjusting the transmission power, channel coding rates and modulation levels according to channel state information. In order to efficiently utilize the AMC scheme, an accurate signalto-noise ratio (SNR) value is normally required for determining the AMC level. In this paper, we propose an efficient link performance estimation technique for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with maximum likelihood (ML) receiver. The performance of ML detection (MLD) is estimated by using capacity bounds of two simple linear receivers. By analyzing the relation between the upper bound and the lower bound of the ML detector performance, we introduce an efficient way to determine the SNR for the ML receiver.