Investigation on elevation beamforming for future LTE-Advanced

Abstract

This paper investigates and analyzes three typical elevation beamforming scenarios which are most likely to be applied in future LTE-Advanced systems: vertical sectorization with same carrier frequency, vertical sectorization with different carrier frequency based on carrier aggregation, and user-specific elevation beamforming. Preliminary evaluation using WINNERII/WINNER+ based 3D MIMO channel modeling is carried out to compare these scenarios with the conventional system with single downtilting. It is shown that the latter two elevation beamforming scenarios can achieve good performance.