Impact of BS antenna number and array geometry on single-user LTE-A data throughputs in realistic Macro and Pico cellular environments

This paper evaluates the theoretic performance of single-user multi-stream beamforming for heterogeneous LTE-A urban deployments (i.e. Macro and Pico cells). The work investigates the impact of six different Base Station (BS) antenna configurations on system level capacity. Our standard configuration assume 8 BS and 8 User Equipment (UE) antenna elements. To enhance capacity the BS antenna number was increased to 12 and 16. A 3D laser-scanned database for the city of Bristol (UK) was used as input to the 3D channel propagation model along with measured 3D complex voltage and polarimetric antenna patterns for the individual BS and UE antenna elements. More than 50,000 ray-traced Pico and Macro cellular links per BS configuration were investigated to ensure statistical relevance. Our analysis quantifies the capacity of an 8×8 Single-User Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (SU-MIMO) solution in realistic urban heterogeneous environments. Results address the system level benefits of increasing the number of BS antenna elements as well as the sensitivity of capacity to vertical and horizontal spatial element configurations.