Potential Throughput Improvement of FD MIMO in Practical Systems

Installing large number of antennas at the transmitter or/and the receiver can increase the channel capacity significantly in theory, however, practical implementations need to consider different system aspects, e.g. compatibility with existing beamforming scheme and reference signal overhead, in order to realize the system level throughput gain in practice. In this paper, we first use an idealized full dimensional multiple input multiple output (FD-MIMO) system to quantize the potential system throughput gain of FD-MIMO systems. We then introduce the reference signal overhead limitation by virtualizing large number of antennas to a limited number of antenna ports. The simulation result shows that through proper antenna virtualization the system throughput gain of one idealized FD-MIMO system can be achieved within reference signal overhead limitation.