System performance challenges of IMT-Advanced test environments

The test environments for system level evaluations of IMT-A (International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced) candidate technologies are analyzed. Compared to the evaluation criteria for previous IMT standards, the IMT-A test environments provide significantly more realistic settings for evaluating system-level performance. The models include line-of-sight probability in all scenarios, different groups of users in terms of propagation and speed, as well as indoor and outdoor deployments. This contribution scrutinizes the evaluation conditions and presents resulting performance for a basic Long-Term Evolution (LTE) candidate system. Each environment contains challenging characteristics. Examples include a mix of indoor and outdoor users, a mix of line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions, and terminal speeds making accurate tracking of channel quality difficult. Together, these characteristics suggest that a radio transmission technology fulfilling the ITU IMT-A requirements is well suited for meeting a variety of challenges of real deployment scenarios.