Candidate architecture for MIMO LTE-Advanced receivers with multiple channels capabilities and reduced complexity and cost

In this paper, a candidate architecture for LTE-Advanced receiver is proposed. Based on the combination of MIMO techniques and flexible spectrum access, LTE-Advanced terminals will require the increasing of the analog front-end complexity. To reduce the complexity of the analog front-end, an innovative architecture based on the merge between the double IQ and the code multiplexing structures is proposed. Simulation and measurement results show that, in a Gaussian case, the bit error rate is similar when using the proposed architecture and the state of the art front-end stack-up structure. A complexity evaluation study reveals significantly reduced power consumption of the proposed single front-end architecture.