Exploiting Mimo Vertical Diversity In A 3d Vehicular Environment

Recently there has been strong interest in extending the MIMO processing from the azimuth dimension to include the elevation plane. This paper compares vertically and horizontally oriented dual polar MIMO LTE-A base station antennas pairs, and studies the performance among large set of users and channel predictions. The study also considers a 2D planar MIMO antenna array arrangement which is compared against the horizontal and vertical configuration for a 4x4 MIMO system. In order to study accurately the performance of such 3D MIMO systems, a 3D ITU propagation channel model is employed in addition to the 3D antenna radiation patterns. Bit level simulations are performed for the downlink physical shared channel (PDSCH) in LTE-A operating at 2.6GHz for a vehicle moving at 35kmph in an urban macro environment. The paper examines the best arrangement for LTE base station dual polarised antenna arrays to achieve the lowest spatial correlation values in a MIMO system.