Field Experimental Results of E-UTRA Downlink with Precoding and Non-Precoding MIMO

Yoshiaki Ofuji, Hideaki Takahashi Satoru Fukumoto, Sadayuki Abeta, and Takehiro Nakamura
Radio Access Network Development Department, NTT DOCOMO INC.
Abstract This paper investigates the effect of precoding in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmission from the viewpoint of transmitter antenna configurations, i.e., space diversity (SD) or polarization diversity (PD), in field experiments using the Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) experimental system. The field experimental results show that there is no performance gap between with and without precoding irrespective of the antenna configuration in a non-line of sight (NLOS) environment when a common precoding vector is applied over the entire signal bandwidth of 18 MHz and the maximum likelihood detection with QRdecomposition and M-algorithm (QRM-MLD) based algorithm is applied at the receiver. In a high correlation channel as observed in a line of sight (LOS) environment, there is also no performance gap between with and without precoding. However, in the high received SINR region, the throughput performance of the precoding with the PD configuration is worse than that without precoding since decoding errors occurre in both codewords, which are mapped onto two different transmitters, due to a significantly high received power gap between vertically and horizontally-polarized antennas. Keywords-E-UTRA, LTE, MIMO, Precoding, Polarization diversity, Field experiments

I.

INTRODUCTION

The 3G Long term evolution (LTE) has been extensively discussed by the 3GPP and the core specifications were frozen at the end of 2008. The Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access (EUTRA) [1], which is the radio access system in 3G LTE, can support full IP-based functionalities with low latency and low cost. In the E-UTRA downlink, the following key techniques, which are appropriate to packet-based radio access, are adopted: adaptive modulation and channel coding (AMC), hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) with packet combining, frequency and time domain channel-dependent scheduling, and multiple input multiple output (MIMO). Among the above techniques, MIMO is the key technique to support a peak data rate above 100 Mbps, which is an important requirement in the LTE, and to increase the system capacity. MIMO with precoding is a technique in which a user-specific transmission beam is generated based on the channel impulse response to maximize the received signal to interference and noise power ratio (SINR) of each stream by inducing high orthogonality between the streams. In the E-UTRA, a codebook-based closedloop type precoding scheme is adopted [2], [3]. In this scheme, the receiver, i.e., user equipment (UE) in the E-UTRA, calculates the predicted received SINRs by multiplying the channel impulse response measured using the downlink reference signal (RS) with precoding vectors in a predetermined codebook. Then, the UE informs the transmitter, i.e., evolved Node B (eNB), of the

precoding matrix indicator (PMI), which maximizes the estimated SINR. On the other hand, there are two major configurations for multiple antennas at the eNB, space diversity (SD) and polarization diversity (PD). The SD configuration requires a large antenna spacing to obtain a low fading correlation between signals that are transmitted from two transmitter antennas to achieve a significant MIMO gain. Meanwhile, the use of the PD configuration can reduce the antenna spacing by employing two orthogonal polarizations. However, the average received powers between signals that are transmitted from vertically and horizontally-polarized antennas differ depending on the angle of the UE antenna. Some studies have investigated the performance gain of MIMO with precoding compared to MIMO without precoding based on computer simulations [4]-[7]. However, these studies do not consider the polarized plane of the signals transmitted from each transmitter antenna. The performance when using the PD configuration may differ from that employing the SD configuration due to the difference in the average received power between the vertically and horizontally-polarized signals in a practical environment. Therefore, this paper compares the throughput performance of MIMO with precoding to that without precoding from the viewpoint of the effect of the eNB antenna configurations, i.e., SD or PD, in field experiments based on the EUTRA experimental system. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sections II and III first briefly explain MIMO with precoding and the eNB transmitter antenna configurations. Then, after the configuration of the LTE experimental system is discribed in Section IV, Section V presents the field experimental results. Finally, we give our conclusions in Section VI.

II.

MIMO WITH PRECODING

The configuration of closed loop type MIMO with precoding is illustrated in Fig. 1. In this scheme, the user-specific transmission beam is generated based on the channel information to maximize the received SINR. The optimal precoding scheme is singular vector decomposition, which requires complete channel knowledge. However, it is not practical to inform the transmitter of the huge information through the uplink feedback channel. Therefore, a quantized beamforming technique maximizing the received SINR was proposed where the receiver sends only the label of the best beamforming vector, i.e., the PMI, in a

978-1-4244-2517-4/09/$20.00 2009 IEEE

Transmitter Input data Modulation and channel coding Stream #2

Data modulation Turbo encoder

Precoding vector controller

PMI from UE Reference signal OFDM mapping Transmitted signal RF transmitter GI insertion

Layer mapping

Precoding vector multiplication

S/P

Interleaver

Input data

Stream #1 Precoding Feedback of PMI Receiver

Figure 1. Closed-loop type MIMO with precoding transmission. TABLE I. RADIO LINK PARAMETERS FOR MEASUREMENT
System bandwidth Number of sub-carriers OFDM symbol duration Sub-frame length Data modulation PDSCH Channel coding / decoding Data modulation PDCCH Channel coding / decoding 20 MHz 1200 (15 kHz sub-carrier separation) 66.7 sec + CP 4.7 sec
Recovered data

Copy

Control signal

Convolutional encoder

IFFT

QPSK modulator

(a) Transmitter
CQI to eNB CQI calculation Turbo decoder Deinterleaver Channel estimation QRM-MLD base separator Reference signal

RF receiver

FFT timing detection

GI deletion

P/S

Turbo code (R = 0.37 to 0.82) / Max-Log-MAP decoding QPSK Convolutional code (R = 1/3) / Soft-decision Viterbi decoding 2/2

RB allocation, MCS information

P/S

Viterbi decoder

FFT

P/S

QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM

PDCCH

GI: Guard interval

Number of transmitter/receiver antennas

(b) Receiver Figure 2. Configurations of implemented E-UTRA experiment system.

predetermined codebook to the transmitter [4],[5]. In this scheme, the receiver estimates the received SINRs by multiplying the channel impulse response measured using the RS and precoding vectors. Then, the best precoding vector among the precoding vectors in the codebook is selected at the receiver. The receiver also estimates the channel state information, i.e., the channel quality indicator (CQI), which is used for scheduling and AMC at the transmitter. The receiver sends both the PMI and CQI to the transmitter in a certain period. In non-correlated channel, the codebook proposed in [4] and [5] is the optimum scheme. However, the fading correlation between the transmitter/receiver antennas varies in a real propagation channel. Thus, the codebook based on the Householder method [6] is applied as the E-UTRA precoding codebook.

transmission may be degraded since the average received power of the signals transmitted from different polarized antennas differs when uni-polarized antennas are employed at the UE receiver.

IV.

CONFIGURATION OF E-UTRA EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEM

III.

SPACE AND POLARIZATION DIVERSITY

The SD configuration using vertical polarized antennas has been the standard configuration at the cell site for transmission diversity for many years. In general, the antenna spacing of tens of wavelengths at the cell site is required in order to obtain a low fading correlation and significant MIMO spatial multiplexing or diversity gain. However, since a large antenna spacing requires more space at cell sites, the deployment of the SD configuration is limited. On the other hand, the PD configuration using dual polarized antennas where two spatially separated uni-polarized antennas are replaced by a single antenna structure employing orthogonal polarized elements is a promising cost and space effective alternative. In particular, when the number of transmitter and receiver antennas is greater than two in MIMO spatial multiplexing and diversity, the application of the PD configuration is very promising. However, the performance of MIMO

A. Transmitter and receiver configuration The configurations of the eNB transmitter and UE receiver, and the major radio link parameters are given in Figs. 2 (a), 2(b), and Table I, respectively. In the eNB transmitter, an input information bit sequence is divided into two codewords. The divided information bit sequences are serial-to-parallel converted, and then each sequence is turbo encoded using the coding rate of R with the constraint length of four bits. The variable channel coding rates are generated by puncturing the parity bits in the encoding sequence of R = 1/3, then data modulation mapping is performed. The modulated data sequences are re-mapped onto layers in the layer mapping stage. After layer mapping, the modulated data sequences are multiplied by the precoding vector, which is received via the PMI channel. Finally, precoded data are mapped to the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH). Subsequently, the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) which informs the eNB of the PMI, RB allocation, MCS, and redundancy version (RV) of HARQ are mapped at the first OFDM symbol in the subframe. The RS used for channel estimation and SINR measurement are scattered mapped onto the time-frequency domain in one sub-frame. RSs of different transmitter antennas are frequency-multiplexed. After inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) processing, guard interval is added at the beginning of each OFDM symbol. Finally, the IF modulated signal is up-converted into the RF signal and amplified by the power amplifier. At the UE receiver, an automatic gain control (AGC) amplifier linearly amplifies the frequency down-converted IF signal from

Received signal

DEMUX

1.0 msec

MUX

TDM-multiplexed

each receiver antenna. A quadrature detector converts the received signals of the receiver antennas into baseband in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components. A/D converters then converts the I and Q signals into digital format. After detecting the fast Fourier transform (FFT) timing using the RS, the guard interval is removed and parallel data sequences are de-multiplexed using FFT processing from the multicarrier signal. The channel gain is estimated using the RS mapped into the time-frequency domain within a sub-frame. The maximum likelihood detection with QRdecomposition and M-algorithm (QRM-MLD) with ASSES [6] based signal separator separates the spatial multiplexed signals transmitted from different transmitter antennas. The UE detects all the allocated RBs and MCSs by decoding the PDCCH. With this information, turbo decoding is performed to recover the information bit sequence. Meanwhile, by multiplying the precoding vector in the codebook with the channel gain, an optimum precoding vector is selected, and then the CQI with the selected precoding vectors is calculated. The eNB is informed of the obtained PMI and CQI value through the physical uplink control channel (PUCCH).

250 m DOCOMO eNB R&D center Point B

500 m

Point A

Figure 3. Measurement points in Yokosuka-city.

Received power (dBmV) 0 1 2 3 4 Delay (sec) 5 Received power (dBmV) 130 120 110 100 90 80 130 120 110 100 90 80 0 1 2 3 4 Delay (sec) 5

B. Transmitter and receiver antenna configuration Field experiments were performed based on a 22 MIMO configuration. Each eNB transmitter antenna comprises vertically and horizontally-polarized elements. The vertically-polarized elements of two antennas are used for the SD configuration. The distance between two antennas is 1 m. While the vertically and horizontally-polarized elements in a single antenna are used for the PD configuration. Employing a cross-polarized antenna at the UE receiver may improve the throughput performance when the PD configuration is employed at the eNB transmitter. However, current typical UEs do not employ cross-polarized antennas. Therefore, we employed unipolarized antennas at the UE receiver. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the performance in the worst case for the PD configuration, i.e., the case in which the difference in the received power levels between signals transmitted from different polarized antennas becomes the largest, we used vertically polarized dipole antennas. The antenna spacing at the UE is 0.5 m. V. FIELD EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

(a) Point A (b) Point B Figure 4. Delay profiles of measurement points.

Kofu train station 2.0 km 1.0 km Chuo line eNB

Arakawa river Route 52

Course A Route 358

Route 411

Course B

Figure 5. Measurement courses in Kofu-city.

1 0.8 CDF 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0
Course A Course B

A. Measurement environment Field experiments were conducted in two different areas. One is a sub-urban area in Yokosuka-city, Kanagawa prefecture nearby Tokyo, and the other is an urban area in Kofu-city, Yamanashi prefecture west of Tokyo. In the measurement area in Yokosuka-city, we investigated the performance in a semi-static environment, i.e., UE at fixed point. Thus, a large precoding gain is expected since the closed-loop precoding control can track the fading variation. Figure 3 shows the measurement points and the location of the eNB. The UE was located at Points A and B, where the distance between the eNB antennas and measurement points are approximately 500 and 100 m, respectively. The antenna height of the eNB and that of the UE

0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 R.m.s. delay spread (sec)

Figure 6. Distribution of r.m.s. delay spread in measurement courses.

are approximately 40 and 3 m, respectively. Figure 4 show the power delay profiles at the measurement points. Many multi-paths are observed within a 5 sec delay as shown in Fig. 4(a), since Point A is in an NLOS environment. The root mean square (r.m.s.) delay spread at Point A is 0.39 sec. On the other hand, since Point B is in a LOS environment, the delay paths are distributed up to 3 sec, although a relatively large delay path is observed. The r.m.s. delay spread at Point B is 0.30 sec.

In the measurement area in Kofu-city, we conducted tests in a mobil environment. Figure 5 shows the measurement courses and the location of the eNB. The antenna height of the eNB is approximately 80 meters. We traveled along the measurement courses, i.e., Course A and Course B, at the vehicular speed of approximately 30 km/h. Figure 6 shows distributions of r. m. s. delay spread for Courses A and B. Since Course A is an NLOS environment, the delay spread distributed up to 0.8 sec. On the other hand, around 90% of delay spread on Course B is less than 0.3 sec since Course B is an almost LOS environment.

120 SD 100 Throughput (Mbps) 80 60 40 20 0 -5 PD Without precoding With precoding

B. Experimental results in semi-static environment Figures 7 and 8 show the throughput performance for MIMO with/without precoding at Point A and Point B, respectively. In these figures, the horizontal axes represent the measured received SINR per receiver branch calculated by linearly averaging the received SINR measured at each receiver branch. We applied both the SD and PD configurations at the eNB for each trial. At Point A, the measured correlation values between the received signals transmitted from two different eNB transmitters for the SD and PD configurations are 0.39 and 0.34, respectively. Those at Point B are 0.60 and 0.35, respectively. The measured cross polarization ratios (XPRs) for Point A and Point B are approximately 7.7 and 16.5 dB, respectively. To measure a wide rage of SINRs, we changed the received signal power by adjusting the receiver gain at the UE. The signal bandwidth of the PDSCH is fixed at 17.28 MHz (= 88 RBs). AMC and hybrid ARQ with the maximum retransmission number of three are also applied in all the tests. There is no performance gap between with and without precoding irrespective of the eNB antenna configuration in the NLOS environment as shown in Fig. 7. Since the wideband precoding which uses common PMI for the entire band, is applied in this test to reduce the PMI feedback signals, the precoding gain is limited due to frequency selectivity in the wider bandwidth (18 MHz) in NLOS environments. Furthermore, MLD based signal detection can provide good performance even though the orthogonality between streams is not small. Therefore, it seems that the improvement in the orthogonality by precoding does not significantly improve the accuracy of the signal detection. Meanwhile, the throughput performance against the measured SINR with the PD configuration at the eNB is worse than that for the SD configuration. Since we used antennas with a verticallypolarized plane at the UE, the received signal powers from the horizontally-polarized elements are smaller than those of the vertically-polarized elements. This received signal power gap between the vertically and horizontally-polarized signals causes signal detection error in MIMO multiplexing. As shown in Fig. 8, there is also no performance gap between with and without precoding irrespective of the antenna configuration at Point B (LOS environment). However, the throughput performance of MIMO with precoding using the PD configuration is worse than that without precoding in the high SINR region over approximately 25 dB. In the MIMO precoding transmission, as described in Section II, the transmitter diversity gain is expected by interleaving the encoded signal for each codeword to two physically different antennas. However, in the

10

15

20

25

30

35

Measured received SINR per antenna (dB)

Figure 7. Throughput performance measured at Point A (NLOS).

120 SD 100 Throughput (Mbps) 80 60 40 20 0 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Measured SINR per antenna (dB) PD Without precoding With precoding

Figure 8. Throughput performance measured at Point B (LOS).

PD configuration, the decoding error in a stream transmitted by a horizontally-polarized wave is increased due to the large received power gap between the vertically and horizontally-polarized signals. As a result, both codewords are erroneously decoded in MIMO with precoding. This tendency is especially observed at a high SINR in which a high order modulation with a higher coding rate is used. From the results at Point A in Fig. 7 and at Point B in Fig. 8, the throughput performance at Point B is worse than that at Point A. This performance degradation at Point B for the SD and PD configurations comes from a high fading correlation and a large XPR, respectively.

C. Experimental results in mobile environment Figures 9 and 10 show the throughput performance with/without precoding in Courses A and B, respectively. We also show the measured fading correlation between signals transmitted from different antennas at the eNB and the XPR in Figs. 11(a) and 11(b), respectively. In the Course A, the measured antenna correlation values are distributed over less than 0.2 both for the SD and PD configurations except for the very high SINR region, since Course A is an almost NLOS environment where there are many obstructions between the UE and the eNB antenna site. On the other hand, in Course B, the correlation value for the SD configuration becomes higher than that in Course A and the highest value is close to 0.6, although that for the PD

120 SD 100 Throughput (Mbps) 80 60 40 20 0 -5 PD Without precoding With precoding

the SD configuration are almost identical. However, for the PD configuration, the performance gap between with and without precoding in the high SINR region is smaller than that for Course A, since the XPR is smaller than that for Course A (note that the distribution of a high XPR in Course A is larger than that in Course B). Furthermore, the throughput performance using the SD configuration is worse than those using the PD configuration in the high received SINR region. This degradation is caused by the signal separation error due to a large fading correlation observed in the high received SINR region in Fig. 11.

VI.
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Measured received SINR per antenna (dB)

CONCLUSION

Figure 9. Throughput performances measured on Course A (NLOS).

120 SD 100 Throughput (Mbps) 80 60 40 20 0 PD Without precoding With precoding

-5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Measured received SINR per antenna (dB)

The performance in E-UTRA MIMO with precoding is investigated based on field experiments by taking transmitter antenna configurations, i.e., SD or PD, into consideration. The field experimental results show that there is no performance gap between with and without precoding irrespective of the antenna configuration in an NLOS environment when a common precoding vector is applied over the entire signal bandwidth of 18 MHz and the QRM-MLD based algorithm is applied at the receiver. Meanwhile, in a high correlation channel as observed in a LOS environment, there is also no performance gap between MIMO with and without precoding. However, in the high received SINR region, the throughput performance of MIMO with precoding using the PD configuration is degraded compared to that without precoding since decoding errors occurs in both codewords due to a significantly high received power gap between the vertically and horizontally-polarized antennas.
REFERENCES
[1] 3GPP, TS-36.300 (V8.7.0), Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (EUTRA) and Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (EUTRAN); Physical Channels, Dec. 2008. [2] 3GPP, TS-36.211 (V8.5.0), Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (EUTRA); Physical Channels and Modulation, Dec. 2008. [3] 3GPP, TS-36.213 (V8.5.0), Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (EUTRA);Physical layer procedures, Dec. 2008. [4] Y. Zhu and K. B. Letaief, Frequency domain pre-equalization with transmit precoding for MIMO broadcast wireless channels, Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, Feb. 2008. pp. 389-400. [5] H. Taoka, Y. Kishiyama, K. Higuchi, M. Sawahashi, Optimum reference signal structure for MIMO multiplexing using precoding in Evolved UTRA downlink, in Proc. IEEE MILCOM 2007, Oct. 2007. [6] C. Mun, Quantized principal component selection precoding for spatial multiplexing with limited feedback, IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 56, no. 5, pp. 838-846, May 2008. [7] F. Liu, L. Jiang, C. He, Low complexity MMSE vector precoding using lattice reduction for MIMO systems, in Proc. IEEE ICC 2007, June 2007. [8] D.J. Love, R.W. Health, Jr., and T. Strohmer, "Grassmannian beamforming for multiple-input multiple-output wireless systems," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 49, no. 10, Oct. 2003. pp. 2735-2747. [9] D. J. Love and R. W. Heath Jr., Limited feedback unitary precoding for spatial multiplexing systems, IEEE Transactions Information Theory, vol. 51, pp. 2967-2976, Aug. 2005. [10] 3GPP, R1-072844, Link level evaluation of 4-TX codebook for SUMIMO, June 2007 [11] K. Higuchi, H. Kawai, N. Maeda, and M. Sawahashi, Adaptive selection of surviving symbol replica candidates based on maximum reliability in QRMMLD for OFCDM MIMO multiplexing, in Proc. IEEE Globecom2004, vol. 4, 2480-2486, Nov. 2004.

Figure 10. Throughput performances measured on Course B (LOS).

0.6 Average XPR (dB) Fading correlation 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Received SINR per antenna (dB)
SD PD Course A Course B

20 15 10 5
Course A Course B

0 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Received SINR per antenna (dB)

(a) Fading correlation (b) XPR Figure 11. Fading correlation and XPR measured in Course A and B.

configuration is slightly higher than that in Course A. This is because Course B is almost a LOS environment, and that there are only low-rise buildings along the course. Figure 9 shows that there is no performance gap between with and without precoding for the SD configuration. We also see that the performance of the SD configuration for both with and without precoding is better than those of the PD configuration due to signal separation error caused by a large XPR. Furthermore, the throughput performance with precoding is degraded compared to that without precoding in the high received SINR region similar to the results in Fig. 8. On the other hand, from the results in Course B in Fig. 10, the throughput performance with and that without precoding using