Analysis of MAC-level throughput in LTE systems with link rate adaptation and HARQ protocols

LTE is rapidly gaining momentum for building future 4G cellular systems, and real operational networks are under deployment worldwide. To achieve high throughput performance, in addition to an advanced physical layer design LTE exploits a combination of sophisticated mechanisms at the radio resource management layer. Clearly, this makes difficult to develop analytical tools to accurately assess and optimise the user perceived throughput under realistic channel assumptions. Thus, most existing studies focus only on link-layer throughput or consider individual mechanisms in isolation. The main contribution of this paper is a unified modelling framework of the MAC-level downlink throughput of a sigle LTE cell, which caters for wideband CQI feedback schemes, AMC and HARQ protocols as defined in the LTE standard. We have validated the accuracy of the proposed model through detailed LTE simulations carried out with the ns-3 simulator extended with the LENA module for LTE.