A link adaptation metric for OFDM-based WLAN systems: received equalised modulation accuracy (REMA)

OFDM-based broadband wireless LAN standards like IEEE 802.11a or ETSI/BRAN HiperLAN/2 rely on adaptive modulation and coding for link adaptation. The paper presents a novel link adaptation metric that enables a better prediction of the BER/PER performance without a priori knowledge of the channel profile. This metric computes statistics from the output of the equalizer in order to take into account the channel noise and multipath fading conditions at the same time. Simulation and experiments show that the proposed scheme is able to improve the overall system performance with a reasonable implementation cost.