LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

11.3 LTE-Advanced Performance Evaluation

11.3.1 Peak Data Rates

The peak data rate increases with wider bandwidth and with more antennas. The LTE-Advanced peak data rates with different multiantenna configurations are illustrated in Figure 11.4. The minimum UE requirement is two receiver antennas. The calculation assumes carrier aggregation of 20 + 20 MHz and 64QAM modulation. The peak rate with single stream is 150 Mbps, dual stream 300 Mbps, four streams 600 Mbps, and with the maximum 8 × 8 MIMO beyond 1 Gbps. If 100 MHz spectrum would be used, the LTE-Advanced peak rate would be 3 Gbps. LTE-Advanced gives peak efficiency of 30 bps/Hz with 8 × 8 MIMO and 15 bps/Hz with 4 × 4 MIMO which exceeds with ITU performance requirements. ITU evaluation environments are summarized in Table 11.3.

Figure 11.4 Downlink peak data rate with different antenna configuration with 20 + 20 MHz.

Table 11.3 ITU evaluation environments.

11.3.2 UE Categories

3GPP Release 8 defined five UE categories with typical commercial devices using Class 3 and 4 with downlink peak rate of 100–150 Mbps with 2 × 2 MIMO and uplink peak rate of 50 Mbps. Release 10 adds three new UE categories shown in Table 11.4. Class 6 and 7 push the downlink peak rate to 300 Mbps by using either 4 × 4 MIMO with 20 MHz or by 2 × 2 ...