Performance of uplink multi-user MIMO in LTE-advanced networks

In LTE Release-8, Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) in the uplink direction is supported with improvement of LTE spectrum efficiency. The further enhancement of uplink reference signal in LTE Release-10 guarantees the bandwidth allocation flexibility and orthogonality of uplink MU-MIMO application in LTE networks. In this paper, the practical MU-MIMO scheduling flow is described and several utilized MU-MIMO pairing metrics are presented. The performance of MU-MIMO application is evaluated and analyzed in the LTE system-level simulator. The influence of different simulation assumptions, such as receiver type, receive antenna configuration and resource allocation strategy, to the uplink MU-MIMO application is investigated and presented in this paper.