MIMO-HSPA Testbed Performance Measurements

Recently a MIMO-HSPA testbed based on the commercial release ´99 products has been within Ericsson in order to demonstrate and evaluate enhanced data rates in the downlink for the evolution of HSPA. The testbed employs two antennas at both the base and mobile stations (2 times 2 MIMO) and is able to adapt between single- and dual-stream data transmission. An extensive outdoor measurement campaign has been carried out using dual-polarized antennas at both ends of the link. With such set-up, it is demonstrated that 2 times 2 MIMO double the peak rate compared to conventional HSDPA in areas of the cell experiencing line-of-sight (LOS) conditions with large SNR. More generally, the cell-wide result demonstrate gains in the 90th percentile Layer-1 throughput of 102% and 36% compared to conventional HSPDA with single- and dual-antenna receivers, respectively. Significant gains in the average throughput are also demonstrated.