Physical layer improvements in 4G/5G wireless communication networks through link adaptation techniques

Long Term Evolution (LTE) represents a significant milestone in broadband mobile communications as it delivers fast global and secure mobile communication technologies for the twenty first century. It features very innovative new air interface technologies such as Orthogonal Frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna technology and fastest link adaptations. All these components that put together will achieve remarkable performance for mobile communications. LTE has been accepted as the basis of fourth generation (4G) wireless technology and it seems that the components included here are so viable, it has staying power even 5G technologies in the future and beyond. The underlying transmission technologies and physical layer model of LTE has deep mathematical roots. Considering the dynamic nature of the transceiver system, such fast responding LTE is best understood through simulations and Matlab is the best tool to do the same. In this paper a 2×2 MIMO OFDM transceiver system with MMSE channel equalization has been setup and its performance is evaluated with and without link adaptation. Results illustrate that the proposed adaptation gives considerable improvement in data rate of the transceiver system without compromising much on the bit error rate.