Throughput, Capacity, Handover and Latency Performance in a 3GPP LTE FDD Field Trial

This article presents a summary of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio system performance during the execution of a multi-site field trial. This exhaustive testing campaign, performed over the lower 700 MHz and 2 GHz bands, includes a battery of stationary and mobility throughput cases, multi-user capacity scenarios, handover performance and latency tests, that have been designed to reveal LTE radio performance under a variety of realistic user scenarios. Tests have been performed using a Category 2 LTE UE, which can handle a maximum transport of 50 Mbps in the downlink and 25 Mbps in the uplink. As the results indicate, the system boasts a peak downlink single-user throughput in excess of 49 Mbps and a peak uplink single-user throughput observed of 19 Mbps, which is quite close to the theoretical uplink limit of 21 Mbps. In multi-user scenarios with four active users, in the best case, we have measured a cell throughput of 47 Mbps in the downlink and 20 Mbps in the uplink, which is close to the theoretical best. Finally, as we show, the system achieves a handover success rate of 100% and a best case average user plane latency of 22ms.