On the performance of SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO in 3GPP LTE downlink

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a next major step in mobile radio communications, and will be introduced as Release 8 in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The new evolution aims to reduce delays, improve spectrum flexibility and reduce cost for operators and end users [1]. To fulfil these targets, new enabling technologies need to be integrated into the current 3G radio network architectures. Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO) is one of the crucial enabling technologies in the LTE system particularly in the downlink to achieve the required peak data rate. The unitary codebook based precoding technique is proposed in the standard to increase the capacity of the system. This paper presents a link level analysis of the LTE downlink and an investigation of the performance of both Single User (SU) MIMO and Multi User (MU) MIMO with codebook based unitary precoding.