Upper Bound Cell Spectral Efficiency of IMT-Advanced Scenarios

The International Telecommunication Union - Radio Group (ITU-R) has established a set of requirements to be met by candidate systems to be accepted as International Mobile Telecommunications - Advanced (IMT-A) compliant and has set up evaluation guidelines to asses compliance. In this paper, a numerical model following these guidelines is introduced to determine the upper bound cell spectral efficiency of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems. In the model rate fair scheduling of concurrent Mobile Stations (MSs) and constant transmit power is assumed. The numerical results when compared to the IMT-A requirements show that the requirements can be met in general only by using Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) transmission and a high degree of coordination between adjacent cells.