Evolution of Adaptive Antennas for LTE Systems

Zayad M.Benguzzi, Mohamed S.Farshouh, AbdallahI.Abrwais, Jalal A.Srar

Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Misurata University, Libya
Abstract Long term evolution (LTE) is a 4G wireless
broadband technology developed by Third Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP), an industry trade group. There is an
increasing interest in technologies that will be define the next
generation (5G) telecommunication standard. Some of these
technologies are already making their way into standards such as
3GPP LTE. 3GPP has been centered on enhancing LTE radio
standards to improve capacity and performance. In order to
increase both the capacity and employed bit rate of the down link
LTE system, an adaptive array of 64-element has been proposed
by the 3GPP in Release-13. In this paper, the capacity
improvement and the saving power of the LTE system due to
using of adaptive antenna array are studied in different channel
scenarios. Simulation results showed that the system developed is
more transmit power efficient as well as capacity improvement to
a remarkable degree when the adaptive antenna is used
compared to the conventional antenna system. Finally, a
mathematical model of the improved capacity over a nonadaptive antenna is used case has been obtained and simulated.

used to provide better performance in low

conditions.

and fading

Beamforming, in general, is a signal processing technique

used to control the direction of the beam pattern of the array
by applying a specific weight complex values for each
element. These weights are updated based on some chosen
beamforming criterion in which the phases and amplitudes are
adjusted to optimize the received signal. This causes the
output of the antenna arrays to form transmission or reception
of the signals in a particular direction and minimizes the
output in other directions [5].
defines many downlink ( ) transmission modes (
)
that employ beamforming. Table 1 summarized some of these
modes, from which we can notice that
of Release 8
supports single layer beamforming, Release 9 added
which supports dual layer beamforming. Moreover, Release
10 added
supporting up to 8 layer beamforming
transmission. Furthermore, Release 11 adds
with up to
eight layers for Downlink Coordinated Multi-Point
Transmission and Reception
. Release 12 achieves
low cost, enhanced coverage Machine-Type Communications
, while Release 13 is the refinement and enhancement
of work started in earlier Releases, including power reduction
in both terminals and base stations via more efficient radio
transmission[6].

Keywords: Adaptive Antenna Array Beamforming, LTE, Power

Saving.

I.INTRODUCTION
Long Term Evolution (
); as defined by the 3rd Generation
Partnership Project (
); is supposed to be the next
generation and will be the basis on which future mobile
telecommunications systems will be built.
engineers
named the technology "Long Term Evolution" because it
represents the next step ( ) in a progression from
, a
standard, to
, the
technologies that based upon
. LTE was required to deliver a peak data rate of
in the downlink and
in the uplink. This
requirement was exceeded in the eventual system, which
delivers peak data rates of
and 75 Mbps
respectively [1].

TABLE 1

Releases

DOWNLINK TRANSMISSION MODES

Transmission modes
: SISO single antenna transmission.
: TX Diversity 2 or 4 antenna.
:

Release 8

Open loop
multiplexing).

SU-MIMO

(spatial

: Closed loop SU-MIMO.

supports deployment on different frequency bandwidths.

The current specification outlines the following bandwidth
blocks:
,
,
,
,
, and
[1]. Frequency bandwidth blocks are essentially the
amount of space a network operator dedicates to a network.
Depending on the type of
being deployed, these
bandwidths have slightly different meaning in terms of
capacity.

: closed loop MU-MIMO.

: Rank 1 spatial multiplexing.
: single layer Beamforming on port 5.
Release 9

: Dual layer Beamforming on ports 7 & 8.

Release
10
Releases
11,12

In
, various antenna technologies, such as antenna array
beamforming, are used to provide better
[2] by a factor of
the number of transmit/receive antennas. Moreover, this
technology, i.e., adaptive antennas; will enhance and improve
the quality of the link between the user equipment
and
the base station[3]. In addition, adaptive antennas can fulfill
the
requirements of higher spectrum efficiency, better
coverage and higher data rate [4]. Beamforming can also be

: Up to 8 layer transmission using ports 7

to 8

Release
13

:Up to 8 layers, antenna ports 7 to14

including

and

Whilst the
system has been studied extensively using
single antenna transmission, there is little research and work
1

Fig.1 Block diagram of proposed design

reported on the
supported adaptive antenna beamforming.
In [7], author have studied the adaptive antennas and the
results show an improvement in
of 1.8
to achieve an
error of 10-3 bit per second (bps) when Stanford University
Interim (
) channel models are used. The performance of
the system can be more improved by increasing the number of
antennas at receiver side. Authors in [8] have investigated the
self-optimization of coverage and capacity in
networks
using adaptive antenna systems. In addition, they study the
self-optimization algorithms of both the uplink and down link
transmission powers by means of simulations in scope of the
coverage and capacity optimization and interference reduction.
The work in [2] shows the employment of transmit and
receive diversity to improve the
by a factor of the
number of transmit/receive antennas. In another study [9], the
Dominant Eigen Transmission (
) power algorithm has
been used to further improve the performance of the system.
This algorithm maximize the
and the Bit-Error Rate at
the
side.

Fig. 2

Cellular Network

The block in Fig. 3 shows the simulation model used in this

paper. In this model we generated a signal message and
transmit it in a Gaussian channel, that includes path loss,
shadowing and interference signal. In this work, one desired
signal and two interferences signals are generated within the
sector.
, power reduction and output Signal to
Interference Ratio (
) are then measured when an adaptive
antenna array of elements are used. Else more, the effect of
shadowing on the system under test is also measured.

In this paper, we investigate the implementation of the

beamforming algorithms, e.g. Zero Forcing ( ), in the
system that supported in Release 13. This improvement of Bit
Error Rate (
), capacity and saving power when adaptive
antenna array is employed have been studied in an Additive
White Gaussian Noise (
) channel with different
values and with the existence of co-channel interfered signals.
In addition, free space and shadowing models have also been
considered in this study. The main purpose of this paper is to
show the huge improvements of
performance when
adaptive antenna array is employed.

Tx

Path Loss

Rx

Channel

Shadowing
Fig. 3 Channel model of the proposed

This paper is organized as follows; in Section

the system
model and problem formulation is introduced. This is then
followed by describing the system environment in Section .
Results obtained from computer simulations for different
number of antenna elements are presented in Section
.
Finally, Section concludes the paper.

Interferenc
e

system

The travelled signals within the sector are modeled based on

the free space model, i.e.,

(1)
where and are the average powers of the received and the
transmitted signals respectively,
(
and
) antennas
gain,
path loss exponent and
is the ratio between
reference distance and distance between user and
.

II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM FORMULATION

The aim of using an adaptive antenna system is to provide the
maximum coverage and capacity at the maximum utilization
of transmission power of each sector antenna gains.

Rewriting (1) to include the shadowing effect yields.

(2)

The block diagram of our study is presented in Fig. 1. A

virtual
network that includes 7 cells-cluster has been is
considered. Each cell contains one base station (
), each
contains three sectors; and each sector coverage 120
degree as shown in Fig. 2. In each cell, a number of users
are assumed.

where
dB is the power after shadowing is added and
is the shadowing value which depends on the standard
deviations [10].
III.SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT

LTE Network Performance

(System Level Simulation)

Measure
(BER Saved power - SIR)

The performance of the considered system has been evaluated

by means of simulations. For comparison purposes, results
obtained with the conventional antenna with one element are
also presented. For the simulations, the following parameters
are used:
A linear array of maximum of 21 isotropic antenna
elements per sector.

N = from 2 to 21
SNR= 0 to 40 dB

 A desired binary phase shift keying (

) arrives at an
angle of
and it is fixed at 500 m from the
..
An
channel.
Weight vector is initially set to zero.

where :
: received power of the desired subscriber.
: noise at the receiver.
: interference power of
undesired subscriber.
Q : number of interfered users.

co-interference signals arrive at

and
with the same amplitudes as the desired signal.
For the shadowing case,
with 4 different values of
standard deviations ( ); 0, 1, 2 and 3 are used.

However, after the Beamformer, the value of

can be
measured by finding the power of the received desired signal
at its specific direction and the summation of the powers of the
undesired signals at their directions. Then applying (4) will
give the required
.

IV. RESULTS
The resulting
performance with different antenna size and
for three
values;
, 5 dB and
; are shown in
Fig. 5, which shows that, increasing
will leads to improve
the output SIR values for all
values, particularly when N
is increased from 2 to 6-elements, i.e., increasing
from 0
dB to around
at
. From Fig. 5 we can
also notice that, the
values from
to
are
almost fixed.

A. Performance of
First, the performances of the considered model has been
evaluated by computing the
for different numbers of
array elements, , and different values of
.
Fig. 4 shows the behavior of the
for
values changes
from -2 to
in
steps. The theoretical values of the
are also calculated using (3) for the same values of
values:
(

(3)

It is observed that under the given conditions, and as expected,

as
increased the
is improved. The enhancement of
BER is also increased with the increase of . For example, at
, the BER is equal to approximately 0.023 when
4-elements is used, however its around 4.56410-11 when all
the available elements, i.e., 21elements, are used. It is
obvious from Fig. 4 that there is a close agreement between
the simulated and theoretical results.

Fig.5

C. Utilization of the power reduction

One of the main advantage of adaptive antenna is to control
the transmission power. In the current measurement, we will
notice the increase of the power saving compared with noantenna array is used. The results of this case are shown in
Fig. 6.

Theory

Fig.4

versus
for different number of antenna array,
measured (lines) and theoretical (marked lines).

versus the number of antenna array elements, N,

for different
values.

for both

Fig. 6 Saved power versus

B. Performance of output
Next, the output
is measured when the number of array
elements is increases for three different values of
;
,
and
. In general, the Signal to Interference Ratio
(
) can be calculated according to

for different

values.

Irrespective of
values, using of adaptive antenna array
beamforming leads to superior power saving compared with
no beamforming case. In fact these results confirm the results
obtained in Sections IV part A and B. Even more, these results
will inturn leads to increase the coverage area and/or decrease
the transmitted power from the
.

D. Performance of cell capacity

As it well known, the adaptive antenna enables a reduction in
co-channel interference which leads to an increase in the
frequency reuse factor. This means that the employment of
adaptive antennas allow more users to use the same frequency
spectrum at the same time bringing about tremendous increase
in capacity. The Normalized Capacity per beam as function in
SNR could be computed from [10]

) and is given in [10] with the comparison of the capacity

M for the case of
. This model yields

where
is a constant depended on the number of antenna
elements and it should be less than 1 and b is the available
bandwidth, that is[10]

(6)
Fig.8 The common area between the beams.

where M is the number of users when no adaptive arrays are

used and is frequency reuse factor.
Fig. 7 shows the normalized capacity per beam calculated
from (5) as a function of the
for four different array size;
, 2, 8 and 21. Here, the capacity obtained from (5) is
multiplied by to find the total capacity. As shown in Fig. 7,
the channel capacity is increased, as expected, as the
is
increased. It is also interesting to notice from Fig. 7 that the
capacity will even more increased if is increased compared
with no array has been used, i.e.,
.

(9)
where M is the channel capacity when N=1; i.e., no antenna
arrays are used, A is a constant equals the values from 0 to 10
and =3.5.

dB

Fig. 7 Channel capacity versus

Fig. 9 Actual capacity for antenna array size of 1 and 21

with a path loss of 3.5

measured for four different array size.

In fact, we cannot take advantage of each antenna radiation

area as that obtained in Fig.7 because there is always an
overlapping area in between any consecutive beams as shown
in Fig. 8. Therefore, to calculate a more accurate capacity than
that obtained in Fig.7, the common area (
has to be
calculated, as show in Fig.8then half of it should removed
from the beam under test.
can be calculated as

(7)

The results shown in Fig. 9 represent the total actual capacity,

, per beam as a function of . From this figure, it's clear
that as the coverage area, i.e. square of cell radius , the actual
capacity per beam is also increased compared with that of N=1
(M). This is also true when the number of elements, N, is
increased. For example, at
, the actual capacity
improvement percentage between the capacity at N=4 and N=8
is approximately 50%.

(8)

V. CONCLUSION

As a result, the actual used area will be

Coverage Area=

In this paper, we to focus on the development of beamforming

technology in LTE system to enhanc the capacity and reduce
the BER. A sector of 21-element antenna array as stated in
LTE Release 13 has been used for different channel scenarios.

Now, the actual capacity beam per cell can be calculated and
plotted as shown in Fig. 9 for different numbers of antenna
elements only. The model of this capacity,
, as a
function of the coverage area (in terms of square of cell radius,
4

All simulations for the proposed system have shown an

improvement in BER, output SIR, power saving and capacity
as the number of the array elements is increased. A
mathematical model of the capacity increment has been
studied, investigated which can be used to estimate the actual
capacity when an adaptive array system is employed in the
BST of the LTE system.

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