Evaluation of LTE link-level performance with closed loop spatial multiplexing in a realistic urban macro environment

Mobile networks based on Long-Term Evolution (LTE) are currently being deployed to meet the rapid growth of mobile data traffic. In this paper we study the performance of LTE considering realistic channel data. The channel measurements were gathered in an urban macro cell scenario. While we focused on the behavior of the feedback control parameter as rank indicator, precoding matrix indicator and channel quality indicator we selected the close loop spatial multiplexing of LTE in the single user setup as transmission mode understudy. Four antenna configurations 2×2 and 4×4 with single and dual polarization are compared. The results show that the availability of high rank indicator values is very low for the single compared to the dual polarization cases. Furthermore dual outperforms single polarization at SNRs higher than 15 and 5 dB for the 2×2 and 4×4 configurations.