Baseline E-UTRA Downlink Spectral Efficiency Evaluation

This paper evaluates spectral efficiency performance of the 3GPP Evolved UTRA (E-UTRA) downlink with baseline settings. A detailed link level tool has been developed including the majority of 3GPP E-UTRA link chain processing modules such as time-domain link adaptation and LI HARQ. Since MIMO is an integral part of the new system, we include four basic multiple antenna configurations in the analysis, namely the SISO, 1x2 SIMO, 2x2 SFC and 2x2 BLAST schemes. Since the BLAST is very sensitive to channel estimation error in cell edge, a case denoted as adapMIMO is considered as well, where the SFC is taken as a backup for the BLAST in cell edge. The system bandwidth is fixed at 20 MHz and a Typical Urban channel model is assumed for both macrocell and microcell evaluations. Simulation results show that in macrocell scenario, the spectral efficiency performance gain of SIMO over SISO is up to 54%, while SFC shows an additional gain of 14% over SIMO. Although the adapMIMO scheme has similar performance as SFC in the macrocellular case, it produces about 30% spectral efficiency gain in the microcell scenario.