CQI Table Design to Support 256 QAM in Small

Cell Environment
Qin Mu, Liu Liu, Lan Chen,Yu Jiang
DOCOMO Beijing Communications Laboratories Co.,Ltd.
email:{mu,liul,chen,jiangy}@docomolabs-beijing.com.cn

AbstractThe mobile data traffic is expected to grow beyond

1000 times by 2020 compared with it in 2010. In order to support
1000 times of capacity increase, improving spectrum efficiency
is one of the important approaches. Meanwhile, in Long Term
Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, small cell and hotspot are important
scenarios for future network deployment to increase the capacity
from the network density domain. Under such environment, the
probability of high Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR)
region becomes larger which brings the possibility of introducing higher order modulation, i.e., 256 Quadrature Amplitude
Modulation(QAM) to improve the spectrum efficiency. Channel
quality indicator (CQI) table design is a key issue to support 256
QAM. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of 256 QAM by
SINR geometry and propose two methods on CQI table design
to support the 256 QAM transmission. Simulation results show
proposed methods can improve average user equipment (UE)
throughput and cell center UE throughput with almost no loss
on cell edge UE throughput.
Index TermsCQI table design, Higher Order Modulation,
Small Cell, LTE-Advanced Release 12

the hotspot and indoor scenario, deploying in high frequency

spectrum with large expandable bandwidth [7].
Based on this situation, many operators consider deploying
small cell in a dedicated carrier in the hotspot area to support
very high throughput and the small cell enhancement topic is
now studied in LTE-Advanced release 12. Generally the coverage of a dedicated-carrier-deployed small cell layer is not continuous, which provide the flexibility of hotspot-area-specific
dynamic traffic adaption on the configuration of working carriers/bandwidth, power on/off and downlink(DL)/uplink(UL)
resource allocation within each small-cell [7]. Fig.1 is a typical
small cell deployment scenario [8].

Macro cell
eNode B

I. I NTRODUCTION
LTE provides full IP packet-based radio access with low
latency and adopts orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and single-carrier frequency division multiple
access (SC-FDMA) in the downlink and uplink, respectively.
The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) finalized the
radio interface specifications for the next generation mobile
system as long-term evolution (LTE) release 8 in 2008 [1],
[2]. In Japan, the commercial service of LTE was launched in
December, 2010 under the new service brand of Xi(crossy)
[3]. Meanwhile, in the 3GPP, there have been efforts targeting
at establishing an enhanced LTE radio interface called LTEAdvanced (release 10 and beyond) [4], [5]and the specification
for LTE-Advanced release 11 is now freezed and the specification for release 12 is started.
Due to the diversity of smart phones,video service and highspeed data access, the mobile data traffic is expected to grow
beyond 1000 times by 2020 compared with it in 2010 [6]. To
achieve this target,improving the spectral efficiency,expanding
wider bandwidth and increasing the network density are important approaches.
Statistics have shown more than 80% traffic load occurs in
hotspot scenarios including outdoors and indoors. However,
most of the typical form factor UEs in the coming few years
will only have 2 receive antennas and 20MHz (or less than
40MHz) bandwidth capability. It will be very important to
support the typical form factor UEs with high performance in

Small cells
cluster
Fig. 1.

Typical small cell deployment scenario.

The prioritized scenario for small cell enhancement is

deploying separate frequency for macro cell and small cell e.g,
2.0 G Hz for macro cell and 3.5G Hz for small cell. Due to
the absence of strong intra-frequency interference from macro
eNodeBs (eNBs), the small-cell layer is able to serve the UEs
with a very high probability of high SINR experience. In this
case, introducing a high-order-modulation such as 256 QAM
is a possible way to reach high spectrum efficiency and peak
data rate in downlink transmission [9], [10], [11].
While the feasibility of introducing a higher modulation
scheme needs to be proved by further analysis. And how to
support the new higher modulation scheme in current channel
quality indicator (CQI) table without increased overhead needs
careful consideration. This paper focuses these issues and the
rest of this paper are organized as follow. Section II proves

978-1-4799-0308-5/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

the feasibility of a higher order modulation scheme in small

cell. Section III gives brief introduction of CQI table and CQI
feedback in LTE system. Section IV presents 2 methods on the
CQI table design. Simulation results are provided in section V
to show the performance improvement in term of average user
throughput, 95% user throughput and 5% user throughput with
proposed methods. At last, we conclude this paper in section
VI.

ficiency is defined as (1-block error rate (BLER))*modulation

order*coding rate. It is observed that, when the SINR is larger
than 20 dB, 64 QAM which is current highest modulation
scheme in LTE system provides little gain, while 256 QAM
could achieve higher spectrum efficiency when the SINR is
higher than 20dB. According to the result of Fig.3 and Fig.4,
it is observed that about 20% UEs could benefit from 256
QAM.

II. F EASIBILITY OF HIGHER ORDER MODULATION SCHEME

IN SMALL CELLS

6
5
Spectral efficiency

In small cell enhancement, as mentioned above the prioritized deployment is separate frequency for macro cell and
small cell. Compared with the co-channel case, the interference from macro cell could be mitigated, then the total
interference could be reduced significantly as shown in Fig.2.
Based on the observation above, high SINR performance could

QPSK
16QAM
64QAM
256QAM

4
3
2

eNode B

eNode B

Co-channel scenario

Separate channel scenario

Signal

1
0
-10

10
SINR(dB)

Interference

Fig. 4.

Fig. 2. Comparison between co-channel scenario and separate frequency

scenario.

be expected in separate frequency scenario. It can also be

proved by the simulation result in Fig.3. In the simulation, for
co-channel case, 2GHz are assigned to both macro cell and
small cell. For separate frequency scenario, 2GHz is assigned
to macro cell and 3.5 GHz is assigned to the small cell.
According to the result, it is observed that more than 20 %
UEs could achieve 20dB in separate channel scenario. For
about 5% UEs, the SINR is even larger than 30 dB.
1
0.9

20

30

Spectral efficiency.

Based on the simulation results and analysis above, it is

clear that a significant portion of UEs in small cell could
benefit from higher order modulation schemes. Therefore,
significant performance improvement could be expected by
introducing a higher modulation scheme in small cell.
III. CQI

TABLE AND

CQI

FEEDBACK IN

LTE

In LTE release 8 to release 11, quadrature phase shift keying

(QPSK), 16 QAM and 64 QAM have been specified for data
transmission. And these modulation schemes are implemented
in the CQI table.

0.8
0.7

CQI

CDF

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
Macro only
smallcell(same freq.as Macro)
smallcell 3.5G (Macro2.0G)
10
20
30
40
SINR(dB)

0.1
0
-10

Fig. 3.

SINR geometry.

Fig.4 shows the spectrum efficiency of different modulation

coding schemes in different SINR situation. The spectrum ef-

CQI index
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

TABLE I
LTE R EL 8-R EL 11

TABLE IN

modulation
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
16QAM
16QAM
16QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM

code rateX1024
out of range
78
120
193
308
449
602
378
490
616
466
567
666
772
873
948

efficiency
0.1523
0.2344
0.3770
0.6016
0.8770
1.1758
1.4766
1.9141
2.4063
2.7305
3.3223
3.9023
4.5234
5.1152
5.5547

The CQI table is mainly used to assist the channel quality

feedback from UEs to eNB. This table includes 16 levels of
different modulation and coding schemes, as shown in Table
I. UEs feed back the effective SINR by conveying the CQI
index with 4 bits. The mapping from effective SINR range to
a corresponding CQI value is carried out such that a BLER
lower than 0.1 is achieved.
IV. N EW CQI

TABLE DESIGN

Considering the error vector magnitude (EVM) effect and

using similar SINR step between 2 CQI indexes we assume
4 new 256 QAM and the related coding schemes will be
introduced in CQI table. The original CQI table combined
with the newly introduced content will form an extended CQI
table as shown in Table.II.

TABLE III
N EW CQI
legacy
CQI index
0
1
3
4
5
6
8
9
10
11
13
14
15
16
18
19

TABLE FOR STRAIGHTFORWARD METHOD

new
CQI index
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

modulation

code rate
X 1024
out of range
QPSK
78
QPSK
193
QPSK
308
QPSK
449
QPSK
602
16QAM
490
16QAM
616
64QAM
466
64QAM
567
64QAM
772
64QAM
873
64QAM
948
256 QAM
772
256 QAM
948
256 QAM
975

efficiency

0.1523
0.3770
0.6016
0.8770
1.1758
1.9141
2.4063
2.7305
3.3223
4.5234
5.1152
5.5547
6.0312
7.3984
7.6171

TABLE II
E XTENDED CQI TABLE WITH 256 QAM
CQI index
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

modulation
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
QPSK
16QAM
16QAM
16QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
64QAM
256 QAM
256 QAM
256 QAM
256 QAM

code rateX1024
out of range
78
120
193
308
449
602
378
490
616
466
567
666
772
873
948
772
873
948
975

efficiency
0.1523
0.2344
0.3770
0.6016
0.8770
1.1758
1.4766
1.9141
2.4063
2.7305
3.3223
3.9023
4.5234
5.1152
5.5547
6.0312
6.7969
7.3984
7.6171

However, such an extended table also requires more CQI

feedback overhead due to larger table length. In order to avoid
additional feedback overhead, smart CQI table redesign is
needed to accommodate the new entries of 256 QAM and
maintain the same length with the legacy table. One direction
is to remove some modulation and coding schemes from the
extended table. But which contents should be removed without
impact on performance gain needs careful investigation. Here
we consider 2 methods to generate the new table based on
remove.
A. Straightforward Method: Linear Remove
Linear remove is one straightforward method. The key point
is to remove some modulation and coding schemes from the
extended table linearly, then form the left content as a new
CQI table. Table.III is an example. In the example, legacy CQI
index 2,7,12,17 are removed from the extended CQI table.
Linear remove is a simple method but lacks effectiveness in
throughput due to no consideration on the SINR geometry and
spectral efficiency loss. To guarantee the performance gain, we

proposed another novel CQI table generation method with the

consideration on SINR geometry and spectral efficiency loss.
B. Proposed method : SINR geometry and spectral efficiency
based remove
To guarantee larger performance gain, the performance
gain loss caused by removing some CQI indexes should be
minimized. Here we propose a theory to model the system
performance gain loss and an algorithm to generate new table
for larger performance gain based on the this model.
1) Performance gain loss modeling: As introduced in section IV, each CQI index corresponds to a set of effective SINR
range. Here the SINR range for CQI index i is denoted as
[SIN Ri , SIN Ri+1 ).
Assume the cumulative distribution function of SINR in
small is denoted by F (x). According to the effective SINR
range for each CQI index and the SINR geometry in small
cell, it is easy to obtain the possibility of each CQI index to
be used in this small cell . In this method, the possibility of
CQI index i to be used is denoted as Pi .
Pi = F (SIN Ri+1 ) F (SIN Ri )

(1)

If CQI index i is removed from the extended table, the

effective SINR range for CQI index i 1 is changed as
[SIN Ri1 , SIN Ri+1 ). That is to say, if the SINR of one UE
is within the range of [SIN Ri , SIN Ri+1 ). UE will report
CQI index i 1 to the eNB. In this case less accurate SINR
report is caused compared with the reporting CQI index i.
If eNBs make scheduling decision based on the less accurate
report , throughput loss is caused. And the throughput loss can
be expressed as
Closs = (SEi SEi1 ) NRB

(2)

In the equation, SEi and SEi1 represent the spectral efficiency corresponding to CQI index i and i 1 respectively.
And NRB denotes the number of resource blocks (RBs)
assigned to this UE. For simplicity,NRB can be assumed as

1. Considering the possibility of CQI index i to be used, the

final expression of throughput loss is modeled as
C loss = (SEi SEi1 ) NRB Pi

(3)

2) Algorithm to generate new CQI table: With the aid of

the performance gain loss model, we proposed the heuristic
algorithm for the new CQI table generation. The key point of
this algorithm is to search the CQI index which cause smallest
C loss and remove it. Then update the CQI table and do the
same operation until the length of the new table becomes the
same as the legacy table.
Algorithm 1 heuristic algorithm for new CQI table generation
Initialization:
L Length of extended CQI table
l Length of legacy CQI table
F (x) SINR geometry in small cell
[SIN Ri , SIN Ri+1 ) SINR range for CQI index i(0
i L 1)
SEi Spectral efficiency for CQI index i(0 i L1)
Iteration:
Obtain the possibility of each CQI index to be used
Pi = F (SIN Ri+1 ) F (SIN Ri )
1: while L > l do
2:
for i = 1 : L 1 do
3:
C loss = (SEi SEi1 ) NRB Pi
4:
i = arg min(Closs )
end for
5:
Remove CQI index i
6:
L=L1
7:
Pi1 = Pi + Pi1
8:
Update the CQI table
9: end while
Output:
New CQI table
TABLE IV
N EW CQI
legacy
CQI index
0
3
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

TABLE BASED ON PROPOSED METHOD

new
CQI index
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

modulation

code rate
X1024
out of range
QPSK
193
QPSK
449
QPSK
602
16QAM
378
16QAM
490
16QAM
616
64QAM
466
64QAM
567
64QAM
666
64QAM
772
64QAM
873
64QAM
948
256 QAM
772
256 QAM
873
256 QAM
948

efficiency

0.3770
0.8770
1.1758
1.4766
1.9141
2.4063
2.7305
3.3223
3.9023
4.5234
5.1152
5.5547
6.0312
6.7969
7.3984

Based on the SINR geometry in Fig.3 and the spectral

efficiency in Table.II, a new CQI table is generated by using

proposed method as shown in Table.IV. In this new table, the

original CQI index 1,2,4,19 are removed from the extended
table.
V. S IMULATION AND ANALYSIS
To verify the performance improvement in the system by introducing higher order modulation scheme with the 2 methods,
system level simulation is performed with the consideration
of EVM. The baseline for comparison is LTE-A SU-MIMO
performance without 256QAM. User average throughput, 95%
user throughput which could reflect the cell center UE performance and 5% user throughput which could reflect the cell
edge user performance are chosen as the metrics. As small cell
mainly serve the UEs with low speed, so this simulation only
focuses low speed environment. And the detailed parameters
for simulation are summarized in Table.V.
TABLE V
S IMULATION PARAMETERS
Deployment scenarios
Carrier configuration
System bandwidth
Channel model
Number of UEs
DL transmission scheme
UE speed
Tx power (Ptotal)
Traffic model
Number of TX
and RX antennas
Antenna configuration
UE receiver
Feedback scheme
EVM

Heterogeneous network with small

cells within the macro cell coverage
Macro@ 2GHz
Small cell @3.5GHz
10M Hz
ITU-UMa for Macro
ITU-UMi for small cell
30 UE (per macro area)
SU-MIMO with rank adaptation
3km/h
Macro:46dBm
Small cell: 30dBm
Full buffer
For macro: 2x2
For small cell: 2x2
CPA
MMSE
Rel-8 RI/CQI/PMI
based on Rel-8 2Tx codebook
28dB (4%)

It can be observed from the simulation results that gain

can be obtained in both methods. Especially for the 95% UE
with good channel condition, up to about 19% relative gain
could be achieved in straightforward method and proposed
method. This is because there is a large portion of these UEs
could benefit from 256 QAM. For average user throughput,
the relative gain are about 10.27% and 7.02% in proposed
method and straightforward method respectively. As for the
cell edge gain, it is not significant. This is because cell edge
UEs have less chance of reaching high SINR to support 256
QAM transmission.
To compare the performance between straightforward
method and proposed method, it can be observed that similar
gain can be achieved for the 95% user throughput due to
the similar introduction of 256 QAM. While for average UE
throughput, proposed method exhibits much better performance. The reason is that proposed method can guarantee the
performance gain by taking the SINR geometry and spectral
efficiency into consideration. As for the cell edge UE gain,
both methods display similar performance. More CQI indexes

for low SINR are removed in proposed method, it seems that

proposed method should exhibits worse performance. In fact,
there is little chance to use these removed CQI indexes due
to good SINR performance in small cell, which cause little
impact on the performance.

16.5
95%-ile UE throughput(Mbps)

16
15.5
15

19.02%

19.8%

14.5
14
13.5
13
12.5
12

Baseline

Straightforward method Proposed method

6.5
Fig. 5.

95%UE(Cell center UE) throughput.

R EFERENCES

Average UE throughput(Mbps)

6.5

6
7.1%

10.2 %

5.5

Baseline

Straightforward method Proposed method

Fig. 6.

Average UE throughput.

5%-ile UE throughput (Mbps)

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

VI. C ONCLUSION
We discussed improving the spectral efficiency by introducing higher order modulation scheme,i.e.,256 QAM in small
cell. We firstly analyze the feasibility of 256 QAM. According
to the analysis, about 20% UEs in small cell could benefit
from 256 QAM. Then we propose 2 methods on the CQI
table design to support the 256 QAM transmission in current
system. At last system-level simulations were run to obtain
system level results on the benefits of introducing 256QAM
with 2 proposed methods. The results reveal that proposed
methods could achieve significant gain in term of average user
throughput and 95% user throughput with little loss on the 5%
user throughput.

Baseline
Fig. 7.

Straightforward method Proposed method

5% UE (Cell edge UE) throughput.

[1] LTE;Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) and Evolved

Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN); Overall description; Stage 2, ser. TS, no. TS36.300, Rel-10 v10.8.0.
[2] M. Tanno, Y. Kishiyama, N. Miki, K. Higuchi, and M. Sawahashi,Evolved utra-physical layer overview,Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, 2007. SPAWC 2007. IEEE 8th
Workshop on.,IEEE, 2007, pp. 1-8.
[3] [Online].Available:http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/2010/001494.html
[4] 3GPP, Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA);LTE physical layer; General description, ser.TS, Dec.2010, no. TS36.201, Rel-10
v10.0.0.
[5] E. Dahlman, S. Parkvall, and J. Skold,4G: LTE/LTE-Advanced forMobile
Broadband.Academic Press, 2011.
[6] 3GPP, RWS-120010,DOCOMO, Requirements, Candidate Solutions &
Technology Roadmap for LTE Rel-12 Onward 3GPP Workshop on
Release 12 and onwards June, 2012
[7] 3GPP, RP-121764, Huawei, HiSilicon, CATR, New Study Item Proposal for Small Cell Enhancements for E-UTRA and E-UTRAN Physical-layer Aspects,RAN 58 meeting, September, 2012
[8] 3GPP, R1-130816, TSG RAN WG1, LS on TP of Rel-12 Small Cell
Scenarios for TR36.872, RAN1 72 meeting, February, 2013
[9] 3GPP, R1-130136,ZTE, Consideration on high order modulation for
small cell, RAN1 72 meeting, February, 2013
[10] 3GPP, R1-130341,Hitachi Ltd, Views on 256QAM for small cell
enhancement emph RAN1 72 meeting, February, 2013
[11] 3GPP, R1-130404, NTT DOCOMO, Enhanced Transmission Scheme
for Small Cell Enhancement, emph RAN1 72 meeting, Febrary, 2013
[12] 3GPP, Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA);LTE physical layer; General description, ser.TS, Dec.2010, no. TS36.213, Rel-10
V9.2.0, Jun. 2010.
[13] S.Sesia,I. Toufik, and M.baker,LTE: the UMTS Long Term Evolution:
From Theory to PracticeJohn Wiley&Sons,Ltd., 2009.