The application of EESM and MI-based link quality models for rate compatible LDPC codes

System evaluation of different resource allocation, power control and link adaptation (LA) solutions require the multi-cell system simulations, which provide important reference to the standardization and system design. Such a system-level simulator is expected to be reliable and quick enough, which requires a very accurate and simple link quality model. The exponential effecrive-SNR mapping (EESM) model [1, 2] and mutual information-based (MI-based) model [3] were proposed recently, which have been proved to be pretty accurate and independent of fading for 3GPP Turbo-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system [3, 4]. This paper investigates the accuracies of the above two models for the low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, in terms of veracity and complexity for different coding rates, block lengths, mobile speeds and modulation schemes. Simulation results verify that both methods show quite good performance in different multi-state channels. The simpler MI-based model performs even better. Especially its coding model is independent of modulation schemes.