Multiple-antenna techniques (MIMO) have beenproposed to improve wireless links spectrum efficiency and/or robustness. There exists a fundamental tradeoff between potential spectrum efficiency and robustness increase.But these multiple-antenna techniques come with an overhead in power consumption due to the duplication of part of the transmitter and receiver front-ends. From a system perspective, one has to focus on performance versus power consumption tradeoff. In this paper, we derive SmartMIMO: an adaptive energy-aware link adaptation approach which, next to the modulation and code rate, decides on using either space-division multiplexing (increasing spectrum efficiency) or space-time coding (increasing robustness) to transmit a given packet on a given MIMO channel. Energy-efficiency is shown to be improved by up to 30% when compared to nonadaptive techniques while the average rate is improved by up to 50% when compared to single-antenna transmission.I INTRODUCTION The performance of wireless communication systems can drastically be improved when using multiple-antenna transmission techniques. Such techniques can be used to increase antenna gain and directionality (beamforming, [1]), to improve link robustness (space-time coding [2,3]) or to improve spectrum efficiency (space division multiplexing [4]). Techniques where multiple antennas are considered both at transmit and receive sides can combine those assets and are referred to as MIMO (Multiple-input, Multiple-output). On the other hand, because of its robustness in harsh frequency-selective channel combined with a low implementation cost, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is currently pervasive in broadband wireless communication. Therefore, MIMO-OFDM schemes turn out to be excellent candidates for next generation broadband wireless standards [5]). Traditionally, the benefit of MIMO schemes is characterized in terms of multiplexing gain (i.e., the increase in spectrum efficiency) and diversity gain (namely, the increase in immunity to the channel variation, quantified as the order of the decay of the bit error rate as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio). In [6], it is shown that, given a MIMO channel and assuming a high signal-to-noise ratio, there exists a fundamental tradeoff between how much of these gains a given coding scheme can extract. Since then, the merits of MIMO schemes are evaluated with regard to that tradeoff. However, from the link perspective, the tradeoff that has to be assessed is between average user data rate and energy efficiency. Characterizing how a diversity gain, a multiplexing gain and/or a coding gain influence the user-relevant tradeoff is not trivial. Transceiver' power consumption is generally made of two terms. The first corresponds to the power amplifier(s) consumption and is function of the transmit power, inferred from the link budget. The second corresponds to the electronics power consumption and is independent of the link budget. We refer respectively to dynamic and static power consumption. The im...