Analysis and Evaluation of Link Adaptation Including MIMO Adaptation

This paper addresses the potential gain of including MIMO adaptation into Link adaptation (LA) Layer. Theoretical analysis is carried out from a new perspective, namely the distribution of unified instantaneous signal to interference and noise ratio (unified SINR) which encompasses MIMO schemes with different number of effective spatial streams and/or different receiver structures. Based on that, the capacity of LA including MIMO adaptation is formulated. Besides the theoretical analysis, issues concerning the practical application of LA including MIMO adaptation are discussed. A two dimensional lookup table (LUT) based on average SINR and SINR ratio is investigated for the selection of MIMO, modulation and coding set every transmission time interval. Results from simulations with real time domain LA show that significant spectral efficiency gain can be achieved as compared to the case of LA without MIMO adaptation.