Link abstraction for variable bandwidth with incremental redundancy HARQ in LTE

Incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (IR-HARQ) scheme used in recent wireless communication standards such as 3GPP LTE provides higher benefits in terms of system capacity and robustness. To map these benefits into system level evaluations is of critical importance. Traditional link abstraction techniques are usually designed for a fixed bandwidth and do not present a generic solution for the variable bandwidth assignment to the users. Therefore in this paper we propose a generic methodology for modeling the IR-HARQ link performance in LTE for the system level simulators. The proposed scheme allows for the arbitrary bandwidth assignments while at the same time reduces the storage requirement for the complex operations of IR-HARQ link abstraction. We apply the proposed methodology to a wide variety of the modulation and coding schemes (MCS) in LTE for a highly frequency selective channel and show that the proposed model provides accurate results.