Link Performance Models for System Level Simulations of Broadband Radio Access Systems

This paper gives an overview of some so-called link performance models used in system level simulations to determine the link packet error rate (PER) at reduced complexity. A subset of link performance models is evaluated in terms of PER prediction accuracy focusing on a single receive and transmit antenna OFDM link with different coding options and channel characteristics. The results demonstrate that a mutual-information based metric which accounts for the modulation alphabet is preferable in the considered cases and, furthermore, applicable to the large class of MIMO-OFDM transmission techniques with linear pre- and post-processing.