Efficient OFDM-HARQ system evaluation using a recursive EESM link error prediction

OFDM system-level simulations require a performance estimate for each link, but it is typically infeasible to conduct simultaneous link-level simulations for multiple users within a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, it is critical to have a simple link error probability predictor that accurately models coded OFDM performance. The exponential ESM (EESM) method was shown to be a very good link error prediction method for multi-carrier systems in the case of single transmission. Here, the EESM method is extended to cover hybrid ARQ (HARQ) techniques: Chase combining, incremental redundancy (IR) or an arbitrary combination of both. Further simplifications are introduced to greatly reduce the amount of memory necessary to utilize EESM for modeling OFDM-HARQ transmissions