Efficient Link-to-System level Modeling for Accurate Simulations of MIMO-OFDM Systems

This paper focuses on emulation of the link-level processing for efficient system-level simulations of MIMO-OFDM based mobile communication systems. While the downlink of 3GPP´s long term evolution (LTE) and the various MIMO transmission modes used therein stand in the focus of our considerations, the proposed techniques can be applied to other MIMO-OFDM based communication systems such as WiMAX. In particular, we compute effective fading gains and interference levels that allow us to very accurately emulate the signal processing at link-level, i.e. channel en-/decoding, (de-)modulation, layer (de-)mapping, preceding and equalization, with minimal complexity during system-level simulations.