Practical Link Adaptation Algorithm with Power Density Offsets for 5G Uplink Channels

Abstract: This letter proposes a pragmatic link adaptation algorithm considering power density offsets (PDOs) for next-generation uplink wireless channels. The proposed algorithm consists of PDO calculation between a physical uplink shared channel and its associated sounding reference signal, key channel state metric generation, and modulation and coding scheme (MCS) adaptation with respect to the PDO. Scaling is applied to estimated channel matrices based on multiple reference PDO points to generate corresponding reference mutual information (MI) values, followed by interpolation or extrapolation to obtain the adapted MI and ultimately MCS. The proposed algorithm has low complexity in terms of hardware implementation, while yielding satisfactory block error rates and throughput for a wide range of PDOs as shown by simulation results.