Channel Dependent Mutual Information in Index Modulations

Abstract: Mutual Information is the metric that is used to perform link adaptation, which allows to achieve rates near capacity. The computation of adaptive transmission modes is achieved by employing the mapping between the Signal to Noise Ratio and the Mutual Information. Due to the high complexity of the computation of the Mutual Information, this process is performed off-line via Monte Carlo simulations, whose results are stored in look-up tables. However, in Index Modulations, such as Spatial Modulation or Polarized Modulation, this is not feasible since the constellation and the Mutual Information are channel dependent and it would require to compute this metric at each time instant if the channel is time varying. In this paper, we propose different approximations in order to obtain a simple closed-form expression that allows to compute the Mutual Information at each time instant and thus, making feasible the link adaptation.