A Comparison Between Different Reception Diversity Schemes of a 4G-LTE Base Station in Reverberation Chamber: A Deployment in a Live Cellular Network

Abstract

The uplink performance of a real fourth-generation long-term-evolution (LTE) frequency-division multiplexing base station was observed by adopting a reverberation chamber as propagating environment. In the downlink direction, the reception of the LTE signal is limited to mobile station receivers. On the other hand, different reception schemes could be implemented by the base station in the uplink direction. Interference rejection and coordinated multipoint reception criteria are based on spatial diversity and are analyzed in a rich multipath environment. These options could be susceptible to impairments due to the presence of Gaussian noise, also including the more realistic case of a discontinuous noise source. The testing session was carried out under a collaboration program between TIM S.p.A., Nokia, and Università Politecnica delle Marche, and it ended up by introducing envisioned reception solutions of the base station in a live customer’s cellular network

Multipath and Doppler Characterization of an Electromagnetic Environment by Massive MDT Measurements From 3G and 4G Mobile Terminals

“…The BLER is the error rate in decoding MAC radio blocks, and it says how difficult the symbol decoding is: the more corrupt (delayed, distorted in phase, amplitude and frequency) the symbol constellation is, the more difficult the decision [23] [24]. So, a correlation between fading severity (in terms of T M ) and BLER can be studied by comparing the performance of cells in different multipath conditions [25]. To this goal, the following cells are selected for UMTS and LTE:…”

Testing of VoLTE mean opinion score in reverberation chambers

“…2 shows typical PDPs reproduced in RC, for various loading conditions (number of panels) inside the chamber. The number of absorbing panels, and their placement, were chosen after several attempts until the match values reported in the standards [15, 23, 26, 28 ]. Table 2 reports the evaluated root main square of the time delay spread for the configurations considered in Fig.…”

“…These were actually the first attempts to use real live BS instead of a BS emulator. Likewise [23][24][25][26][27], this paper exploits the commercial LTE BS of Nokia Network Italia to assess the performance of VoLTE services. To this ground, typical propagation environments such as indoor/outdoor locations or commercial/residential settlements (please refer to [23,24]) are reproduced in the in-house RC of the Università Politecnica; hence typical values for the delay spread, decay time and Rician K-factor are generated.…”

Throughput Modeling and Validations for MIMO-OTA Testing With Arbitrary Multipath

“…The model shows good agreement with LTE throughput measurements in a reverberation chamber (RC). The RC emulates multipath environments with isotropic angular distribution and Rayleigh (or Rician) fading channels [8]- [10]. Hence, the previous throughput model is limited to the Kronecker channel model [11] with isotropic angular distribution and complex Gaussian channel coefficients (e.g., reverberation chambers).…”