An apparatus and method for a transceiver are provided. The apparatus for the transceiver includes a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna; a transceiver connected to the MIMO antenna; and a processor configured to measure channel gain Hk, based on the received signal, where k is a sample index from 1 to K, Hk is an m×n matrix of complex channel gain known to the transceiver, measure noise variance σ2 of a channel, calculate a per-sample channel quality metric q(Hk, σ2) using at least one bound of mutual information; reduce a dimension of a channel quality metric vector (q(H1, σ2), . . . , q(HK, σ2)) by applying a dimension reduction function g(.); and estimate a block error rate (BLER) as a function of a dimension reduced channel quality metric g(q(H1, σ2), . . . , q(HK, σ2)).