Emerging Tools for Link Adaptation on 5G NR and Beyond: Challenges and Opportunities

With the speeding up of the fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) worldwide commercialization, one of the paramount questions for operators and vendors is how to optimize the radio links, considering the widely diverse scenarios envisioned. One of the key pillars of 5G has been an unprecedented flexibility on the configuration of the radio access network (RAN) on scenarios that include cellular, vehicular, and industrial networks among others. This flexibility has its main exponent on link adaptation (LA), which has evolved into a multi-domain technique where a plethora of parameters, like numerology, bandwidth part, radio frequency beam, power, modulation and coding scheme (MCS) or multiple antenna precoding can be adapted to the instantaneous link conditions. Although such enhancements open the door to a significant performance improvement, they also pose many challenges to LA optimization. In this article, we first present the signaling aspects of NR technology for multi-domain LA and the challenges that need to be faced. Then, we explore the latest advances on LA for wireless networks. We envision a combination of machine learning (ML) tools with multi-domain LA as a key enabler for 5G and beyond networks. Finally, we investigate emerging ML approaches for LA and present a promising application of ML for LA that is assessed with simulations. With this scheme, the training is performed at the network side to relieve the user equipment (UE) to do such a complex task. It is shown with simulations that our ML approach outperforms the well-known outer loop link adaptation (OLLA) algorithm in terms of instantaneous block error rate (BLER), while reaching the same average spectral efficiency (SE). Interestingly, it is shown that the proposed scheme only requires 4 bits to represent the features used to train the model, which makes it suitable for implementation in real systems with limited feedback.