Comparison between measured and computed values of the mean mutual information per coded bits in OFDM based wireless transmissions

To provide a high system performance, the link adaptation algorithms need an accurate method to predict the Block Error Rate (BLER) performance of a transmission on a given realization of the wireless multipath propagation channel. A promising BLER prediction technique is based on mean mutual information of the received bits (MI). The main objective of this paper is to compare the MI values obtained at the reception of a real physical transmission, with the ones provided by the available analytical models. For this we implemented a transmission chain on an Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) device. The obtained results shows relatively good coincidence, but as might be expected, in some cases the measured values slightly differ from the computed ones.