Performance capacity of MIMO heterogeneous LTE-advanced network

This paper evaluates the user capacity performance analysis of pico-cells and macro-cells in multiple-input multiple-output heterogeneous LTE-Advanced networks. The analysis makes use of state-of-the-art 3D ray-tracing for a large number of pico and macro-cell base station and user locations. A baseband 2×2 MIMO LTE-A link level simulator via 3D extended channel model was designed and implemented in MATLAB to determine the user performance in pico-cells and macro-cells for line-of-sight links and non-line-of-sight link. The received bit mutual information rate abstraction method is used to determine the optimum physical layer throughput based on analysis of all available modulation and coding schemes. Packet error rate and optimum capacity per meter squared are evaluated for pico-cellular and macro-cellular users. Results show that the deployment of pico-cells can be used to improve existing macro network capacity and performance in an LTE-Advanced network.