Exponential Effective SIR metric for LTE downlink

3GPP LTE is the evolution of UMTS which will make possible to deliver next generation high quality multimedia services according to the users' expectations. The flexibility of the downlink OFDM radio interface with Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC), MIMO and H-ARQ plays a crucial role in achieving the low latency and high spectral efficiency promised by the new radio access standard. This paper presents a LTE DL link level simulator whose main purpose is to generate suitable look-up tables to interface with a system level simulator. In this context, the Exponential Effective SIR (EESIR) metric is a link abstraction model that is used to properly characterize multistate channels. The reference BLER curves in AWGN channel and the parameters of the EESIR model are given for the complete list of CQI's specified for LTE DL. The obtained results also include curves of mean link level throughput for different AMC formats and MIMO configurations.