Performance Evaluation of 3D MIMO LTE-Advanced System

This paper demonstrates a simulation methodology based on a reasonable 3D channel model. System level simulations on various 3D antenna port configurations are performed, and results are compared with those of 2D MIMO system. Several interesting observations are made from the evaluation results: (1) the vertically distributed active antenna elements provide less MIMO gain than the horizontally distributed active antenna elements; (2) with the same number of antenna elements, the 3D active antenna configuration can provide better performance than the 2D one, and the performance improvement is much larger for MU-MIMO than SU-MIMO; (3) even when the 2D antenna configuration has more antenna elements (providing more antenna array gain) than the 3D active antenna configuration, the 3D configuration can still outperform the 2D one if there are enough transmitter ports.