Chapter 11
LTE Measurements
11.1 Introduction
This chapter presents measurement results using the LTE air interface with 5 to 20 MHz bandwidths in the laboratory and in the field in Europe, the USA and Asia. The carrier frequencies used ranged from 700 MHz to 2600 MHz. The measurements were made during field trials as well as in commercial networks. The aims of this chapter are to introduce measurement procedures and methods of analysis and to illustrate LTE's performance compared to the expected results. The analysis of the results focuses on the peak data rates, link adaptation, multi-user capacity, mobility and latency.
11.2 Theoretical Peak Data Rates
First, we will discuss the methodology used to determine the 3GPP layer 1 reference peak data rates in order to compare the values with the actual layer 1 performance observed in trials.
The achievable peak throughput in downlink and uplink transmissions is limited by the maximum number of bits of a Shared Channel (SCH) transport block that can be accommodated by the LTE UE device during each Transmission Time Interval (TTI). The transport block sizes are summarized in Table 11.1. As defined in 3GPP TS 36.306 [1], the maximum data rate for a Category 2 LTE device is 51.0 Mbps in the downlink and 25.5 Mbps in the uplink. The corresponding data rates for Category 3 and 4 are 102.0 Mbps and 150.8 Mbps in the downlink. The uplink data rate for Categories 3 and ...
