Field Measurements of Uplink MU-MIMO

In order to identify the technology potential of uplink MU-MIMO, Ericsson developed the LTE TDD test bed according to 3GPP Release 8 specification with simplified MMSE receiver and scheduling schemes. The implemented simplified MMSE receiver can significantly reduce the computation complexity with the restriction that the dominant interference should be monitored by the receiver. This paper presents plenty of field test results of uplink MU-MIMO in single cell. The test results show that the simplified receiver can work well for uplink MU-MIMO and that majority potential throughput gain can be achieved with low complexity implementation. The results further mean that complex scheduling scheme or receiver implementation is not mandatory to achieve majority of gain from MU-MIMO in the tested cases.