An Experimental Evaluation and Its Analysis on Downlink MIMO Wireless Transmission Performance of LTE Field Trial in Specified Ubiquitous District

Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, which is specified in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 8 and employs downlink multiple input multiple output (MIMO) transmission, is drawing attention as a promising next generation cellular mobile radio system due to its high spectral efficiency compared to the current High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) system. The authors performed a field trial of an LTE system that complies with 3GPP Release 8 in Kitakyushu-city, Fukuoka, Japan, as a specified ubiquitous district project promoted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan. This paper first summarizes the field trial. Next, it describes the overview of the field trial system and reports the field experiment results on the downlink 2×2 MIMO wireless transmission. Finally, it compares the field experimental results to laboratory experimental results obtained with a hardware channel simulator using the channel model based on Recommendation ITU-R P.1816.