Advanced co-channel interference aware signal detection has drawn research attention during the recent development of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems and the interference-aware communications (IAC) is currently being studied by 3GPP. This paper investigates link performance abstraction for the IAC systems employing maximum-likelihood detector (MLD). The link performance of MLD can be estimated by combining two performance bounds, namely, linear receiver and genie-aided maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver. It is shown that the conventional static approach based on static parameterization, while working well under moderate and weak interference conditions, fails to generate a well-behaved solution in the strong interference case. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new adaptive approach where the combining parameter is adaptively adjusted according to instantaneous interference-to-signal ratio (ISR). The basic idea is to exploit the probabilistic behavior of the optimal combining ratio over the ISR. The link-level simulation results are provided to verify the prediction accuracy of the proposed link abstraction method. Moreover, we use the proposed link abstraction model as a link-to-system interface mapping in system-level simulations to demonstrate the performance of the IAC receiver in interference-limited LTE systems