Consideration of MIMO in the planning of LTE networks in urban and indoor scenarios

Broadband wireless access is emerging as one of the hottest areas of growth within mobile communications. It enables users to enjoy the same QoS they have at home, in the office or wherever they go. 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest standard in the mobile cellular network technology. Innovative wireless communication systems, such as LTE, are expected to offer highly reliable broadband radio access in order to meet the increasing demands of emerging high speed data and multimedia services. For the planning of LTE networks, the investigation of radio transmission in urban areas, but also within and into buildings is getting more important. This paper introduces a deterministic approach for the simulation and performance evaluation of LTE networks in urban and indoor scenarios. Besides signal levels the expected MIMO capacity is evaluated. Comparisons with two measurement campaigns verify the high accuracy of the presented prediction model.