The Study of Indoor and Field Trials on2×8MIMO Architecture in TD-LTE Network

Abstract

With the development of mobile internet service, long-term evolution (LTE) system was proposed in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) to provide higher data rates and frequency efficiency. Since the year of 2010, 113 LTE networks have been commercially deployed worldwide, and most of the networks are based on frequency division duplexing (FDD). In this paper, measurement methods of four MIMO transmission modes (TMs) in time division-LTE (TD-LTE) are studied and analyzed. Link level simulation is carried out to evaluate the downlink throughput for different signal-to-noise ratios and parameter settings. Furthermore, indoor and field tests are also presented in the paper to investigate how real-world propagation affects the capacity and the error performance of MIMO transmission scheme. For the indoor test, radio channel emulators are applied to generate realistic wireless fading channel, while in the field trials, a live TD-LTE experiment cellular network is built, which contains several evolved nodeBs (eNBs) and a precommercial user equipment (UE). It is shown from both simulation and tests results that MIMO deployment gives a substantial performance improvement compared with the third generation wireless networks.