Practical multi-antenna terminals in LTE system performance simulations

In cellular radio network simulations the modeling of terminal antennas is often extremely simplified. In this paper the results from a study on the impact of using realistic terminal antennas in LTE system simulations are presented. Results from downlink simulations using measured radiation patterns of a number of typical multi-antenna terminals have been compared with results using an ideal antenna model. The results showed that the impact was weak in a scenario with high intercell interference while a substantial performance degradation could be observed in a scenario with low interference. Cell-edge throughput was found to be the most sensitive performance metric which in the worst case suffered a 53% throughput reduction compared to the ideal model. An analysis of the relation between antenna properties and system performance is also presented. It was observed that the geometric mean of the eigenvalues of the pattern covariance matrix has a distinct connection to system performance. It was also found that efficiency is important for cell-edge throughput and that the pattern correlation has impact on peak throughput.