A novel 3D beamforming scheme for LTE-Advanced system

Beamforming is a well-known signal processing technique to increase the received signal strength to a chosen direction. Recently, the three dimensional (3D) beamforming technique has gained a growing interest due to its potential to enable various strategies like user specific elevation beam-forming and vertical sectorization. Compared with conventional horizontal beamforming, 3D beamforming exploits the channel´s degrees of freedom in the elevation direction with the active antenna system (AAS). Currently, 3GPP is on the study phase of this advanced MIMO technique and is working on the 3D channel model specification. In this paper, we propose a new 3D beamforming algorithm which combines conventional horizontal beamforming and elevation beamforming. Simulations are used to evaluate our proposed beamforming algorithm in urban macro environment with different inter-site distance (ISD).