Performance verification of uplink 8-antenna receiver in LTE-Advanced Release 12

LTE UL has been identified as the coverage and capacity bottleneck compared to DL, according to the comprehensive 3GPP studies and field trials. As an effective and promising solution for UL performance enhancements, BS 8-antenna receiver is being more and more widely deployed in LTE commercial networks. To verify the baseband demodulation ability of commercial BS products, a work item has been started to specify demodulation requirements for BS 8-antenna receiver in 3GPP LTE-Advanced Release 12. This paper firstly analyzes the performance gain of BS 8-antenna receiver in terms of UL capacity improvement, coverage extension as well as UE transmission power reduction, and the importance of specifying global demodulation requirements in 3GPP. Then detailed discussion and proposals on the key aspects of developing the performance requirements are presented, including: 1) the channel modeling methodology and derivation of MIMO spatial correlation matrices for 8-antenna reception; 2) how to determine the test requirements for LTE UL physical channels. It is shown that commercial BS products with 8-antenna receiver can achieve 3.0dB, 3.2dB and 3.2dB average gain respectively for PUSCH, PUCCH and PRACH, with respect to 4-antenna receiver.