A Lightweight and Accurate Link Abstraction Model for the Simulation of LTE Networks in ns-3

In this paper, the authors present a link abstraction model for the simulation of downlink data transmission in LTE networks. The purpose of this model is to provide an accurate link performance metric at a low computational cost by relying solely on the knowledge of the SINR and of the modulation and coding scheme. To this aim, the model combines mutual information-based multi-carrier compression metrics with link-level performance curves matching, to obtain lookup tables that express the dependency of the block error rate on the SINR values and on the modulation and coding scheme being used. In addition, they propose a 3GPP-compliant channel quality indicator evaluation procedure, based on the proposed link abstraction model, to be used as part of the LTE adaptive modulation and coding mechanisms.