Performance Study of an Enhanced Downlink Control Channel Design for LTE

The expected extensive use of new transmission schemes and network deployment paradigms for 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems will significantly increase the pressure on the downlink control channel structure. More users than before will be scheduled within a single transmission interval by the base station due to extensive use of multi-user multiple-input multiple output (MU-MIMO) transmission and cross-carrier scheduling. In order to meet these requirements, new control channel designs facilitating frequency-selective allocation and precoding for the transmission of downlink control information are currently discussed in 3GPP. In this paper we discuss the features of such an enhanced downlink control channel design and provide a detailed performance comparison between the conventional control channel design and the enhanced one by means of stochastic system level simulations.