Finite Blocklength Analysis for Coded Modulation with Applications to Link Adaptation

In this paper, a new approach to the wireless link adaptation based on theoretical results from the finite blocklength analysis is proposed. Theoretical bounds on parallel complex AWGN channels with coded modulation inputs are studied. A model based on these theoretical bounds is provided for the application of link adaptation. The proposed approach to link adaption only requires a significantly small number of simulations to tune the model and is able to predict the performance of parallel channels with arbitrary combinations of SNRs without referring to any lookup table as in the traditional approach. The model is tested with turbo and polar codes. The result demonstrates significant improvement over the traditional methods in link adaptation in terms of accuracy and the amount of computation.