LTE-A Field Measurements: 8x8 MIMO and Carrier Aggregation

The introduction of 8×8 MIMO and carrier aggregation in the 3GPP LTE Rel. 10 opens up for increased user throughput. The potential gains using these techniques have been evaluated in a field measurement campaign with a testbed implementation. A downlink throughput exceeding 1 Gbps has been achieved combining 8×8 MIMO in an outdoor macro scenario with carrier aggregation using three component carriers (3×20 MHz). The relation between the achievable throughput and the channel richness arising from the physical environment and antenna spacing was demonstrated. The performance of MIMO setups ranging from 1×2 up to 8×8 was evaluated in indoor-to-indoor, outdoor-to-indoor, and outdoor-to-outdoor deployments. It was observed that each added transmit or receive antenna increased the throughput. These gains were achieved with a compact UE antenna that is reasonable in size for implementation in a consumer device.