Separate Horizontal amp; Vertical Codebook Based 3D MIMO Beamforming Scheme in LTE-A Networks

Traditional two-dimensional (2D) multi-input multioutput (MIMO) beamforming technologies can only adjust the beamformers in the horizontal dimension according to horizontal channel information. However, due to the three-dimensional (3D) character of the real channel, 2D MIMO beamforming technologies can not achieve the optimal system throughput. In this paper, a 3D MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed, which takes into account vertical beamforming. In the proposed scheme, we first design a codebook for Vertical dimension based on 3D MIMO channel model; then a 3D MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed combining the proposed Vertical beamforming codebook and legacy horizontal dimension beamforming codebook. Through simulation, we evaluate the proposed 3D MIMO beamforming scheme and compare it with former 2D beamforming technology. Owing to the additional spatial degrees of freedom in Vertical dimension, our 3D MIMO beamforming scheme can effectively improve the overall system performance.