On scalability, robustness and accuracy of physical layer abstraction for large-scale system-level evaluations of LTE networks

We present an in-depth performance analysis of the gains of physical layer (PHY) abstraction when compared to a full implementation of the physical layer. The abstraction model uses either effective signal to noise plus interference (SINR) mapping or mutual information effective SINR mapping and covers different transmission modes as well as support for hybrid automatic repeat request. Using the OpenAirInterface LTE system level simulator we show that for a simple network with one base station and two user equipments these PHY abstraction techniques decrease the simulation time by a factor of up to 100 while providing the same accuracy as with the full PHY implementation.