IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 62, NO.

6, JUNE 2014

3299

Interleaved-MIMO DAS for Indoor Radio Coverage:

Concept and Performance Assessment
Enrico M. Vitucci, Member, IEEE, Luigi Tarlazzi, Franco Fuschini, Pier Faccin, and
Vittorio Degli-Esposti, Member, IEEE

AbstractDistributed antenna systems (DAS) represent a suitable method for extending multiple-operator radio coverage into
indoor premises, tunnels, etc. With the advent of 4G (and beyond)
mobile communications systems and of multiple inputmultiple
output (MIMO) transmission techniques, a common problem for
wireless operators is how to upgrade existing DAS systems to the
MIMO technology in a cost-effective way. In this paper novel
indoor solutions based on the combination of DAS and MIMO
transmission techniques (Interleaved-MIMO DAS solutions) are
proposed, and their performance is investigated in realistic cases
with the aid of measurements, ray tracing simulations, and LTE
link-level simulations.
Index TermsIndoor radio communication, MIMO systems,
mobile communication, optical fiber cables, radio propagation,
ray tracing.

I. INTRODUCTION

RESENT and future cellular wireless standards such

as long term evolution (LTE) and LTE-advanced make
use of multiple inputmultiple output (MIMO) transmission
techniques to improve data throughput and quality of service.
In multipath-rich environments such as the indoor one, MIMO
technology can in fact achieve good diversity and multiplexing
gains [1]. Such high gains, however, can only be reached when
the signal to noise ratio (SNR)in case including interference
considered as noiseis sufficiently high. Several studies [2],
[3] have shown that 2025 dB can be identified as an adequate
SNR threshold for the system to start taking advantage of the
multiple data streams transmission modes.
This outcome entails a significant limitation for MIMO systems application to real-world scenarios, especially indoor scenarios where coverage is provided through outdoor Base Stations (BS) and, therefore, suffers from indoor-penetration losses
and blind spot problems.
Manuscript received February 21, 2013; revised January 30, 2014; accepted
March 12, 2014. Date of publication March 21, 2014; date of current version
May 29, 2014. This work was carried out in the framework of, and supported in
part by, the EU project Architectures for fLexible Photonic Home and Access
networks (ALPHA), ICT CP-IP 212 352. This work was also supported in part
by the European Network of Excellence NEWCOM++.
E. M. Vitucci, F. Fuschini, and V. Degli-Esposti are with the Alma Mater
Studiorum-Universit di Bologna, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dellEnergia
Elettrica e dellInformazione Guglielmo Marconi (DEI), IT-40136 Bologna,
Italy (e-mail: enricomaria.vitucci@unibo.it; franco.fuschini@unibo.it;
v.degliesposti@unibo.it).
L. Tarlazzi and P. Faccin are with CommScope Italy Srl, IT-48018 Faenza,
Italy (e-mail: luigi.tarlazzi@commscope.com; pier.faccin@commscope.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2014.2313136

As a matter of fact, a growing number of high-speed wireless

communication services will have to operate in, or will have
to be extended to, indoor environments in the near future. For
these reasons Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) coverage-extension schemes, first proposed in [4], are mandatory to really
exploit MIMO potential in indoor and micro-cellular environments [5]. In DAS systems the same signal (of a single BS) is
distributed (or repeated) to M remote antenna units (RAUs)
using cables or optical fibers (F-DAS) to achieve a better and
more widespread radio coverage.
The traditional MIMO implementation over a DAS scheme
requires to provide each RAU with all n MIMO branches: in a
MIMO scheme for example, each RAU is equipped with a
n-element antenna array, and related connections. This solution
may be called co-located MIMO DAS and requires the deployment of nxM antenna elements and cables [see Fig. 1(a)].
Recent studies have shown the advantages of distributed
antenna elements are further
MIMO schemes where the
spaced over the environment to achieve lower fading correlation
between different branches and, therefore, better performance:
this concept is applied to simple outdoor and indoor DAS
schemes in [6], [7], whereas in [8], [9] is also extended to
large outdoor cellular systems, where antennas at different base
stations work in cooperation thus enhancing the cell capacity
with respect to a noncooperative case. The combination of
MIMO and DAS in a large indoor or microcellular environment
opens the way to novel distributed MIMO system
with
architectures were the different branch antennas are not simply
more spaced but distributed over different DAS locations
altogether. In this case multiple repetitions of the n MIMO
branches are interleaved over different RAUs, and each RAU
is equipped with a single antenna element corresponding to
a single MIMO branch [see Fig. 1(b)]. In this scheme, DAS
provides both widespread coverage and at the same time implements distributed MIMO. The M/n repetitions of the MIMO
branches should be properly interleaved to allow the signal
from all branches, or at least from most of them, to be received
with good and possibly similar SNR over the service area,
therefore, optimizing both radio coverage and MIMO capacity.
For this reason we use the term interleaved-MIMO DAS (see
Section II).
Interleaved-MIMO DAS (i-MIMO DAS) schemes are being
considered with great interest by operators and installers because they might yield a performance level comparable to that
of a co-located MIMO DAS (c-MIMO DAS), but with a number
of antenna elements and cables reduced by a factor of , being
the MIMO order. Moreover, the extension of an existing SISO

0018-926X 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

3300

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 62, NO. 6, JUNE 2014

DAS architecture to an interleaved MIMO DAS solutions requires almost no additional deployment costs as no modification
of the existing infrastructure (antennas, cables, cable runways
etc.) is necessary.
A drawback with respect to c-MIMO DAS is the nonuniform
SNR of the different MIMO branches at the mobile terminal.
Although recent standards such as LTE can cope with up to
1215 dB of power imbalance between different branches at the
mobile receiver, i-MIMO DAS implementation in real environments cannot guarantee such a figure over the whole service
area.
The evaluation of the consequences of this problem is object
of investigation in this paper.
The i-MIMO concept, introduced for the first time in [10],
is further developed, theorized and evaluated in a systematic
way in the present paper using an ad-hoc measurement setup,
ray tracing (RT) propagation simulation and LTE system simulation. The scheme and characteristics of a possible, practical
implementation of i-MIMO DAS are described in Section II.
In Section III, the measurements performed using a suitable
MIMO setup in two different environments are described. In the
same section an advanced RT simulator [11] is validated against
measurements for the first time in terms of important MIMO
parameters such as the condition number and the power-imbalance. Once validated, the RT tool is then used to feed propagation data into an LTE link level simulator [12] to determine
the performance of 2 2 i-MIMO DAS in a number of realistic
environments (Section IV). Results show that i-MIMO DAS solutions can actually approach the performance of c-MIMO DAS
at a much lower cost. Performance assessments of higher order
i-MIMO DAS and general planning guidelines are outlined in
Section V. Conclusions are drawn in Section VI.

(or at least strategically located, see Section V) to allow a good

overlap of the respective coverage areas at the mobile terminal,
and thus a proper MIMO combination of multiple-branch
signals. For sake of clarification, Fig. 1(a) and (b) depicts two
deployment examples of a co-located MIMO F-DAS and of
an Interleaved-MIMO F-DAS, respectively: it is evident that,
while the number of RAU is equal, the i-MIMO solution has a
lower cost, since the number of antenna elements and cables
is halved. In the following, we will omit the F in the F-DAS
acronym as it is understood that DAS is usually implemented
through RoF technology.
The acronym
i-MIMO -DAS will be used in the
following to indicate an i-MIMO DAS with M RAUs. While
for co-located MIMO configurations a typical spacing between
the antenna elements varies from half a wavelength to a few
wavelengths, which corresponds to a few centimeters in the frequency bands currently in use, for i-MIMO DAS the antenna
spacing can reach several meters (RAU distances up to 20 m
are considered in the present work).

II. INTERLEAVED-MIMO F-DAS

From a general point of view, a MIMO system with transmitting antennas and receiving antennas can be described by
the channel matrix, i.e., a
matrix of channel impulse
responses [1].
It is well known that MIMO capacity depends on both the
SNR and the singular values of the channel matrix. Instead of
the latter, a more synthetic parameter has been considered in
this paper, i.e., the condition number (CN), which is strictly related to channel capacity [14]. CN is defined as the imbalance
between the singular values of , or between the eigenvalues
of
(where the superscript stands for matrix transposition
and conjugation). In other terms

A common way to implement DAS is using radio-over-fiber

(RoF) technology where a master optical transceiver unit (MU)
converts the downlink RF signals generated from the base station (BS) into an intensity-modulated optical signal through direct modulation of the bias current of a laser diode. The modulated optical signal is then distributed through fiber connections
to each RAU where photo-detection allows back-conversion to
the RF domain. After that, the RF level is amplified and filtered
according to the system design plan and radiated by the remote
antenna. For the uplink similar operations are performed backwards [5], [13].
Ordinary F-DAS deployments do not take advantage of
MIMO technology because they are just designed to provide
SISO wireless coverage. It is, therefore, important to upgrade
existing F-DAS systems to make the implementation of MIMO
transmission schemes possible. In an i-MIMO F-DAS system,
each MIMO branch is split into several signals and sent to multiple RAUs using the RoF technology and different branches
are properly interleaved over different RAUs [10]. In particular, each RAU is linked to a MU which transmits/receives
wireless signals related to a specific MIMO antenna branch.
The different antenna elements corresponding to the MIMO
branches should be spaced enough to experience different
propagation conditions (different links) but still close enough

III. MIMO MEASUREMENTS AND RT VALIDATION

MIMO propagation has been characterized through two measurement campaigns carried out in two different environments.
In addition, the RT model previously developed at the University of Bologna [11] has been checked against the measured data
in terms of MIMO parameters such as the power imbalance (PI)
and the Demmels condition number (CN) defined in the next
subsection.
To the authors knowledge this kind of RT validation has not
been previously reported in the literature.
A. MIMO Parameters Definition

(1)
and
are the maximum and the minimum eigenwhere
value of the matrix, respectively. Especially for 2 2 MIMO
systems, CN can be considered a good indicator of the potential multiplexing gain. From a practical point of view CN values
should not be too high (e.g. lower than 15 dB) to fully exploit
the spatial multiplexing mode recently introduced in the latest
4G standards (LTE/LTE-A). In addition to the CN, SNR is also
of crucial importance.
In the present work we show that another important performance parameter specific for i-MIMO DAS deployments is the

3301

VITUCCI et al.: INTERLEAVED-MIMO DAS FOR INDOOR RADIO COVERAGE: CONCEPT AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Fig. 1. Example of (a) c-MIMO F-DAS and (b) i-MIMO F-DAS deployments for a 2

Fig. 2. The 2

2 MIMO-LTE measurement setup.

Power Imbalance (PI) between different MIMO branches at the

Tx side, which in a 2
2 MIMO system can be defined as
follows:
(2)
In (2), the first subscript in the channel matrixs elements
is the Rx antenna index while the latter is the Tx antenna index.
In higher order MIMO cases, the imbalance can either be evaluated for all the possible couples of branches or through global
parameters such as the standard deviation of the power received
from all branches (see Section V).
B. The Measurement Campaigns
The 2
2 MIMO-LTE emulator and measurement setup
sketched in Fig. 2 has been used for all measurements. At the
transmitter (Tx) the LTE MIMO signals are generated in a
personal computer, downloaded to the two Agilent MXG signal
generators and transmitted.
At the receiver (Rx), composed by two Agilent MXA signal
analyzers, proper LTE signal analysis software performs the
MIMO signal demodulation. The MIMO channel parameters

2 MIMO case. Here,

and

are estimated through the down link reference signals (RS) over
a 5 MHz channel.
Two extensive measurement campaigns have been carried out
with the above described setup in different indoor scenarios.
The first scenario is Villa Griffone, the historical villa in the
outskirts of Bologna (Italy) were young scientist Guglielmo
Marconi carried out his first experiments. Its an 18th century
building, with thick stone walls and can, therefore, be considered a hostile environment for radio propagation, representative
of historic buildings of many European cities. Measurements
in this scenario have been carried out at the frequency of
1935 MHz. Three different MIMO DAS deployments have
been considered.
2 2 c-MIMO DAS, i.e., co-located MIMO with a single,
2-branch MIMO RAU. Tx elements are spaced by
.
2 2 i-MIMO 2-DAS
2 2 i-MIMO 4-DAS
At the Rx side, arrays of two omni-directional antennas with
a
spacing were used. A more detailed description of this
measurement campaign can be found in [10].
A second measurement campaign at a different frequency
(858 MHz) and with similar MIMO DAS deployments was
carried out within a different building (the Commscope-Italy
building) featuring a typical modern indoor office environment, with internal walls made of plasterboard and, therefore,
quasi-transparent to radio waves. The RAU locations and the
Rx positions (routes B, C, H) used in this second measurement
campaign are displayed in Fig. 3 on the plan of the building.
Regarding the Tx antenna configuration, the considered
MIMO DAS deployments and the related active antennas
locations are listed below (0 and 1 are the identifiers of the
two Tx MIMO branches):
c-MIMO 1-DAS with 2 antenna elements located in Tx0
and Tx1 (
antenna spacing)
i-MIMO 2-DAS (RAUs located in Tx0 and Tx1)
i-MIMO 4-DAS (RAUs located in Tx0, Tx1 , Tx0 and
Tx1 )

3302

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 62, NO. 6, JUNE 2014

Fig. 3. Plan of the office building with transmitting locations and measurement routes.

At the Rx side the same antenna setup as in [10] has been

adopted. It is worth noticing that all measurements have been
performed in static conditions.
The number of measurement positions is 10 in route C, and
4 in routes B-H. The spacing between such positions was about
in route C, and
in routes B-H. Moreover, in order to
get local averages, the measurement data have been recorded
several times moving the Rx array on a 4 4 point grid centered
on each measurement position, with a grid step of
.
C. Results and RT Validation
RT simulations have been carried out using a 3D digitized
map of the considered environments (Section III-B), with the indoor RT simulator described in [11]. Standard electromagnetic
parameters have been considered for the walls (
,
).
Antennas have been characterized in anechoic chamber, and
the measured 3D radiation patterns have been embedded in RT
simulations.
In Fig. 4 the measured and RT-simulated CN and PI values
are shown, for two different i-MIMO solutions (2- and 4-DAS)
and for both the considered environments. A rather satisfactory
agreement between measurement and simulation is evident (see
[10] for some further examples).
In order to show that the RT model can predict not only the
average values of CN and PI, but also their statistical distribution, the measured and simulated CDFs of CN are depicted in
Fig. 5 for the positions 1 and 4 of route H shown in Fig. 3. CDFs
for the other positions fall in between and are not shown in the
figure for clarity.
Since the CN is generally considered related to MIMO
channel capacity [14], the accuracy of the RT-simulated CN
testifies that RT can be considered a reliable tool to simulate
MIMO parameters. This is further confirmed by the good mean
error and standard deviation of the errors displayed in Table I.
The only exception is represented by the route B, where the

Fig. 4. Average Condition Number and Power Imbalance along a corridor for:
(a) 2x2 i-MIMO 2-DAS deployment and (b) 2x2 i-MIMO 4-DAS deployment.
dB-value local averages are computed on the 4x4 point grid centered on each
measurement position.

poor result is probably due to the presence of metallic objectsa coffee machine and a built-in wardrobenot included
in the digitized map.

VITUCCI et al.: INTERLEAVED-MIMO DAS FOR INDOOR RADIO COVERAGE: CONCEPT AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

3303

TABLE II
TX-SIDE CORRELATION COEFFICIENTSi-MIMO 2-DAS CASE

antennas are spaced of several wavelengths or when dual-polarized antennas are used, both PI and small-scale fading correlation can affect the MIMO performance: that is why in [19]
an empirical model for CN evaluation is proposed, based on
the knowledge of PI and channel correlations at Tx side (often
called Tx antenna correlations for simplicity).
The complex correlation coefficient at Tx side can be defined
as
Fig. 5. Route H with 2
2 i-MIMO 4-DASMeasured versus simulated
CDFs of Condition Number in positions 1 and 4.

TABLE I
RT SIMULATIONSPREDICTION ERRORS

It is worth noticing that the deterministic prediction of coherent parameters such as the CN is a challenging task since
a realistic reproduction of the amplitude and phase distributions of the multipath components is required. In this context,
the adoption of hybrid models based on integration of deterministic ray models and statistical diffuse scattering models is
a key asset, as recently highlighted by a number of investigations [15][18]. The diffuse scattering model described in [15],
embedded into the RT simulator adopted here, is an example
of such hybrid technique: as shown in [16][18], this approach
leads to a sensible improvement in the prediction of multidimensional channel parameters.
The results in Fig. 4 highlight a clear correlation between the
CN and the PI. This fact is rather intuitive as, similarly to a low
CN, a low PI between different branches received through different propagation links is necessary to achieve good capacity in
distributed MIMO. Conversely, in co-located MIMO with small
antenna spacing, were only one propagation link exists, the CN
only depends on small-scale fading correlation, and, therefore,
the PI has little significance. In some intermediate cases, when

(3)
which is the correlation between channels originating from
transmit antennas and and arriving at receive antenna .
However, one of the peculiarities of distributed MIMO deployments is precisely to obtain negligible channel correlations
at the Tx side, because of the very high spacing between the
antenna elements. This is confirmed by our measurement campaigns (as shown in Table II for the 2 2 i-MIMO 2-DAS deployment) and, therefore, the PI alone can be considered a good
performance indicator in i-MIMO systems.
Since MIMO capacity strongly depends on the SNR value,
we can conclude that the SNR and the PI are likely the most important parameters for i-MIMO DAS performance. Differently
from the CN, the PI can be estimated just on the base of simple
path loss models, such as [20].
This aspect can facilitate the development of planning tools
and the investigation of effective deployment strategies for distributed i-MIMO systems without resorting to complicated RT
algorithms.
IV. INTERLEAVED-MIMO DAS PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
In order to investigate the performance of the proposed
i-MIMO DAS solution in a realistic case, a complete LTE link
level simulation has been carried out combining RT prediction
and the LTE simulator developed at the Technical University
of Vienna [12].
By default the LTE simulator dynamically generates different
MIMO matrixes at each simulation run, exploiting the powerdelay profiles (PDP) provided by several, embedded standardized channel models (e.g., AWGN, ITU-R Pedestrian, Vehicular and Indoor models, WINNER, etc.) and taking into account
some additional characteristics such as the type of fading (block
fading, fast fading) and channel correlations.
In this paper the channel matrices were generated differently;
namely directly through RT simulations and fed into the LTE
simulator, so as to get a more realistic performance evaluation
of the measured scenarios (see the next section).
Link level simulations show that the performance (i.e., the
throughput) of an i-MIMO DAS system mainly depends on the

3304

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 62, NO. 6, JUNE 2014

Fig. 6. Block chart of the integration of RT and LTE simulators.

SNR and on the PI values. Clearly, this aspect can be better

highlighted if PI values over an interval as large as possible are
available.
Since higher power imbalance can be expectedon the averageas the frequency increases, the LTE simulations have
been carried out at the frequencies of 750 and 2680 MHz, corresponding approximately to the lowest and highest downlink
frequencies allocated for LTE deployments in North America
and Europe.
Despite the RT has been experimentally validated in
Section III-C at different frequencies, they are close enough
to the new values to ensure in practice the same prediction
accuracy.

TABLE III
SETTINGS OF THE RT SIMULATIONS

A. Description of the Simulation Process

Fig. 6 shows the block chart of the complete simulation
process, which can be divided into three consecutive stages.
1) The first stage, i.e., the MIMO propagation channel simulation, consists of RT simulation in the office environment of
Fig. 3. Simulations are based on several input parameters, such
as those related to the 3D environment geometry and materials
description, the position of the radio link terminals, the number
and type of interactions of the rays with the environment, and
the carrier frequency. The RT simulations settings are summarized in Table III.
Several Rx locations were considered: in particular, the Rx
routes L, O, R, S, W, (represented in gray in Fig. 3) were simulated in addition to the measurements routes B, C, H, in order
to get a characterization over the complete environment. A grid
of 100 spatial samples was considered for each Rx location (see
Table III) to take into account small-scale fading.
2) In the second stage the impulse responses provided by the
RT simulator were used to generate the MIMO channel matrices
fed as inputs to the LTE simulator. In particular many channel
matrices were generated (one for each Rx spatial sample), each

of them representing a MIMO channel realization experienced

by the LTE system every 1 ms-transmit time interval (TTI).
In this way it was possible to obtain a more realistic description of the MIMO channel, compared to the case of simulations
performed using the standard power-delay profiles embedded
in the LTE simulator. In Fig. 7, an example of RT-simulated
PDPfor the same scenariois reported and compared with
the indoor office tapped-delay-line model of ITU-R recommendation M1225, small indoor office case. The disagreement is
evident, especially for large delays.
The generated MIMO channel matrices have been normalized with respect to the expectation of the square root of the average power gain of each channel realization, according to (4)

(4)

where
is the Frobenius norm of the channel matrix (see,
also, [13, p. 74]), and
is the MIMO order. Using such

VITUCCI et al.: INTERLEAVED-MIMO DAS FOR INDOOR RADIO COVERAGE: CONCEPT AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

3305

TABLE V
SETTINGS OF THE LTE LINK LEVEL SIMULATOR

Fig. 7. Comparison of a simulated PDP (route C, Rx location #5) with PDP

model suggested by ITU-R (rec. M1225) for the small indoor case.

TABLE IV
SETTINGS OF THE MATLAB PROCEDURE

normalization in a 2
and, therefore

2 MIMO case, we have

According to this normalization, the SNR averaged on the

different channel realizations can be expressed as:
, being
the transmitted power and the thermal
noise power.
This second stage also requires some additional run parameters such as the Tx antenna power, the Thermal Noise power
and the Rx noise figure, in order to compute the SNR values
to be considered (see Fig. 6 and Table IV). In particular, 4 Tx
antenna power levels with a 10 dB step were considered to test
the performance of the LTE MIMO link over a wide range of
coverage levels. The values reported in Table IV are related to
a single antenna element in the Co-located MIMO case, while
the Tx antenna power of the interleaved case is 3 dB higher. In
fact, in order to make a fair comparison between the c-MIMO
DAS and the i-MIMO DAS cases, the total radiated power was
kept constant.
3) The third and final stage of the simulation process deals
with the LTE simulation of the wireless link previously modeled through the RT algorithm: the channel matrices obtained
by the RT simulations (second stage) are input to the LTE simulator, and then, after having set the additional parameters listed
in Table V, the LTE link level simulator is launched to compute
the selected merit figures (e.g. physical layer throughput, BER,
etc.).
Since the objective here is the evaluation of the maximum
achievable throughput using an i-MIMO deployment, the
maximum channel bandwidth allowed by the LTE standard

was considered (20 MHz), and the LTE transmit mode was
set to Closed loop spatial multiplexing (i.e., Transmit Mode
4 according to 3GPP TS 36.211), which means that the Base
Station adjusts, besides the modulation and coding scheme,
also the MIMO transmission parameters such as the number of
independent transmitted streams and the pre-coding applied to
them, as a function of the channel conditions reported by the
Rx mobile terminal (User Equipment, UE in the LTE standard).
Summing up, for each position of the UE within the considered
environment the complete simulation process provides the
physical layer throughput, the bit error rate (BER), the CN
and the PI. For a more detailed description of the simulation
procedure, see [21].
The procedure described above has been used to evaluate the
performance of i-MIMO DAS versus c-MIMO DAS, assuming
that the DAS system is hooked up to a 2 2 MIMO-LTE Base
Station (referred to as eNodeB in the LTE standard). In particular, four different RAU locations have been chosen (P1, P2,
P3, and P4 of Fig. 3), and two different deployments have been
simulated.
Case #1 with all antenna locations (P1, P2, P3, P4) active. For this deployment, the performance of c-MIMO
and i-MIMO 4-DAS configurations are analyzed and compared, assuming that both Tx branches are assigned to
each RAU location in the first configuration, and only one
branch to each RAU location in the second configuration.
Case #2 with only two antenna locations (P1 and P3) active. For this deployment, the performance of c-MIMO
and i-MIMO 2-DAS configurations are analyzed and compared, similarly to case #1.
B. Analysis of the Simulation Results
The physical layer throughput as function of the SNR averaged over all the Rx routes for the considered deployments are
reported in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9, for both carrier frequencies and for
four Tx power values.
The comparison between the solid and the dashed traces at
the lower frequency [Figs. 8(a) and 9(a)], clearly shows that the
c-MIMO DAS and the i-MIMO DAS solutions reach almost
the same throughput despite the lower cost of the interleaved
solution which requires half the number of antennas and cables
(see Fig. 1).

3306

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 62, NO. 6, JUNE 2014

Fig. 10. LTE throughput as a function of SNR and Power Imbalance for the
i-MIMO DAS configuration.
Fig. 8. Average LTE Throughput as a function of SNR for deployment #1
(c-MIMO 4-DAS versus i-MIMO 4-DAS) at (a) 750 MHz and (b) 2680 MHz.

Fig. 9. Average LTE Throughput as a function of SNR for deployment #2

(c-MIMO 2-DAS versus i-MIMO 2-DAS) at (a) 750 MHz and (b) 2680 MHz.

Only a slight throughput degradation is visible in the deployment case #2 [Fig. 9(a)], for which the radio coverage is worse
due to the lower number of Tx antenna locations. It can be also
verified that the throughput approaches the saturation level of
147 Mbps for both deployment cases at the SNR level of 40
dB. Concerning the higher frequency [Figs. 8(b) and 9(b)], for
both deployment cases a 1015 Mbps throughput advantage for
the c-MIMO DAS solution in the intermediate SNR range of
2535 dBs can be seen. The performance gap gets narrower as
the SNR approaches the saturation level of 40 dB. The higher
propagation losses with respect to the 750-MHz carrier, and the

consequent higher power imbalances, could be brought in to explain the performance degradation of the interleaved solution
at 2680 MHz. However, all the throughput plots are congruent
since they are computed as function of the SNR.
In order to investigate more deeply the influence of both coverage and PI on the physical layer throughput, Fig. 10 shows a
multidimensional plot of the throughput obtained by combining
the results of the interleaved deployments #1 and #2 at both carrier frequencies.
For each pair of SNR and PI values, the throughput is displayed in a color-coded format: different throughput zones
can be identified in Fig. 10, according to the color.
It is evident that increasing SNRs and decreasing PIs produceon the averagehigher channel throughput.
This further testifies that in addition to the SNR the PI between the MIMO branches is also of crucial importance for the
correct deployment of an LTE i-MIMO DAS, as already discussed in the previous sections.
If these requirements cannot be satisfied (green/blue points in
Fig. 10), diversity schemes can be, however, adopted to improve
the BER value.
Moreover, it should be also noted that these results have a
general validity for LTE systems operating in single user mode
and in the considered, reference environments. Of course, other
systems adopting different MIMO schemes or operating in
very particular propagation environments might show different
behaviors.
V. I-MIMO PLANNING PRINCIPLES
A. High-Order i-MIMO Deployments
In this section the deployment of i-MIMO DAS of arbitrary
order in large indoor environments is studied. If n is the MIMO
order at the base-station side and
the number of RAUs,
then we have M/n repetitions of the n MIMO branch-signals
which must be properly interleaved over the environment to
both optimize radio coverage and minimize power imbalance. It
is evident that in a uniform, linear coverage deployment along a

VITUCCI et al.: INTERLEAVED-MIMO DAS FOR INDOOR RADIO COVERAGE: CONCEPT AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Fig. 11. Uniform, 2D 4 4 i-MIMO DAS coverage. Left: wrong, noninterleaved coverage solution. Center: interleaved coverage solution with a 4-branch
cluster highlighted in black. Right: 1-shift interleaved coverage solution. Each
color/letter corresponds to a different MIMO branch-signal.

corridor different branches must simply be alternated to minimize imbalance. In a 2D coverage case, however, and even
more so in a 3D case, the best deployment scheme is not always trivial.
For example in a four-branch case, the solution on the left
in Fig. 11 is clearly unbalanced and, therefore, should be discarded. In order to limit the spatial power imbalance, it is intuitive that the four branches should be arranged in a square
cell cluster, highlighted in black in Fig. 11. Of course, different clusters can be laid over the service area in different
ways; for instance, they can be simply aligned to each other
(Fig. 11-center), or a 1-cell down-shift can be introduced between adjacent columns (or rows) of clusters (Fig. 11-right). The
shifted solution might yield different imbalance and, therefore,
performance levels, but first simulation results do not seem to
confirm this effect.
Even in the best deployment, the received power from a
given branch peaks in the vicinity of the corresponding RAU
location and, therefore, the power imbalance also peaks. Moreover, high-order MIMO deployment solutions corresponding
to big clusters will necessarily yield greater spacing between
different-branch RAUs and, therefore, larger imbalance, especially in propagation environments where path loss increases
rapidly with distance.
B. Planning Method Outline
Power imbalance can be expressed through the parameter PI
defined in (2) only if
. For higher order i-MIMO DAS
systems (i.e.,
), the overall power-imbalance level at a
given Rx location can be expressed through the following standard deviation parameter:
(5)
is the local averagemade over all Rx antenna
where
elementsof the i-th branch power.
is, of course, the total
power received from all the RAUs radiating the same i-th
MIMO-branch signal and
is the average received power.
represents the standard deviation of the set
and represents in our opinion the best metric
to measure power imbalance when
. According to
preliminary simulations performed using the LTE link-level
simulator presented in Section IV,
, together with the
average SNR computed as
(6)

3307

determines the throughput for higher order i-MIMO systems in

rich scattering environments. The throughput consistently increases with SNR and decreases with , very similarly to what
is shown in Fig. 10 for
.
and SNR are simple parameters that can be easily
computed given an i-MIMO DAS deployment over a service
area using empirical-statistical path-loss formulas such as the
one presented in [20]. Once
and SNR are computed, the
throughput can be estimated and different deployment strategies can be evaluated.
Overall, planning strategies should comply with the following general rules:
i) RAU antenna spacing and Tx power should be chosen so
as to guarantee a sufficiently high SNR all over the service
area and in particular at cell border;
ii) the different MIMO branches should be distributed over
the RAU antennas in a proper interleaved fashion to
minimize
so as to determine cell clusters as shown
in Section V-A
In addition, since high-order i-MIMO DAS deployments
and/or high path-loss environments lead to high imbalance
between the different branch-signals, the MIMO order should
be matched to the propagation characteristics to keep
low
enough. In other words, an increase in the MIMO order could
yield a less-than-proportional increase in throughput if path
loss increases too rapidly with distance and generates a too
high power imbalance.
The planning of i-MIMO DAS in relation to the propagation
characteristics and to the dimensions (e.g., 2D, 3D, etc.) of the
deployment will be studied in detail in further work.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper a novel, cost-effective type of indoor radio
coverage solution based on the combination of DAS and
distributed-MIMO techniques, called Interleaved-MIMO DAS
(i-MIMO DAS), is proposed and its performance is investigated
in realistic cases with the aid of measurements, ray tracing
simulations, and LTE link-level simulations. Ray tracing has
been successfully applied for the first time to predict MIMO
performance parameters such as condition number and power
imbalance. Link-level simulation results show that i-MIMO
DAS schemes can achieve a level of performance similar to
colocated MIMO DAS solutions, but with a lower overall
system complexity.
Finally, a planning methodology based on major propagation
parameters such as SNR and power imbalance (PI, measured
through ) is proposed. Results show that proper, interleaved
deployment solutions based on the concept of cluster should
be adopted to keep
low enough and optimize performance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Agilent Technology for its
significant support throughout this paper. They are also thankful
to B. Mazilu of Andrew Wireless Systems GmbH, and to their
graduate students R. Foiera and F. Falaschi for the great help
in carrying out the measurement campaign and the ray tracing
simulations.

3308

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 62, NO. 6, JUNE 2014

REFERENCES
[1] A. J. Paulraj, D. A. Gore, R. U. Nabar, and H. Blcskei, An overview
of MIMO communicationsA key to gigabit wireless, Proc. IEEE,
vol. 92, no. 2, Feb. 2004.
[2] T. Haustein, V. Kumar, and T. Wirth et al., Measurements of multi-antenna gains using a 3GPP-LTE air-interface in typical indoor and outdoor scenarios, presented at the European Wireless 2008 (EW2008),
Prague, Jun. 2008.
[3] S. Catreux, V. Erceg, D. Gesbert, and R. W. Heath, Jr., Adaptive
modulation and MIMO coding for broadband wireless data networks,
IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 108115, Jun. 2002.
[4] A. Valenzuela, A. Rustako, and R. Roman, Distribute antennas for
indoor radio communications, IEEE Trans. Communications, vol.
COM-35, no. 12, pp. 12451251, Dec. 1987.
[5] M. Fabbri and P. Faccin, Radio over fiber technologies and systems:
New opportunities, in Proc. 9th Int. Conf. Transparent Optical NetworksICTON 2007, Jul. 15, 2007, pp. 230233.
[6] R. Ibernon-Fernandez, J.-M. Molina-Garcia-Pardo, and L. Juan-Llacer,
Comparison between measurements and simulations of conventional
and distributed MIMO system, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett.,
vol. 7, 2008.
[7] M. Alatossava, A. Taparugssanagorn, V.-M. Holappa, and J. Ylitalo,
Measurement based capacity of distributed MIMO antenna system
in urban microcellular environment at 5.25 GHz, in VTC Spring
2008, IEEE 67th Vehicular Technology Conf., May 1114, 2008, pp.
430434.
[8] B. K. Lau; M.A. Jensen, J. Medbo, and J. Furuskog, Single and multiuser cooperative MIMO in a measured urban macrocellular environment, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 624, 632,
Feb. 2012.
[9] V. Jungnickel, S. Jeckel, L. Thiele, L. Jiang, U. Kruger, A. Brylka,
and C. von Helmot, Capacity measurements in a cooperative MIMO
network, IEEE Trans. Veh. Tech., vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 23922405, Jun.
2009.
[10] L. Tarlazzi, P. Faccin, E. M. Vitucci, F. Fuschini, and V. Degli-Esposti,
Characterization of an interleaved F-DAS MIMO indoor propagation
channel, presented at the 6th Loughborough Antennas & Propagation
Conf. 2010 (LAPC 2010), Loughborough, U.K., Nov. 89, 2010.
[11] V. Degli Esposti, D. Guiducci, A. deMarsi, P. Azzi, and F. Fuschini,
An advanced field prediction model including diffuse scattering,
IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 17171728, Jul.
2004.
[12] C. Mehlfhrer, M. Wrulich, J. C. Ikuno, D. Bosanska, and M. Rupp,
Simulating the long term evolution physical layer, presented at the
17th Eur. Signal Processing Conf. (EUSIPCO 2009), Glasgow, Scotland, Aug. 2009 [Online]. Available: http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/
PubDat_175708.pdf
[13] J. Capmany and D. Novak, Microwave photonics combines two
worlds, Nature Photon., vol. 1, pp. 319330, 2007.
[14] C. Oestges and B. Clerckx, MIMO Wireless Communications: From
Real-Word Propagation to Space-Time Code Design. Oxford, U.K.:
Academic (Elsevier), 2007.
[15] V. Degli-Esposti, F. Fuschini, E. M. Vitucci, and G. Falciasecca, Measurement and modelling of scattering from buildings, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 143153, Jan. 2007.
[16] V. Degli-Esposti, V. M. Kolmonen, E. M. Vitucci, and P. Vainikainen,
Analysis and modeling on co- and cross-polarized urban radio propagation for dual-polarized MIMO wireless systems, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 59, no. 11, pp. 42474256, Nov. 2011.
[17] F. Mani, F. Quitin, and C. Oestges, Directional spreads of dense multipath components in indoor environments: Experimental validation of
a ray-tracing approach, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 60, no. 7,
pp. 33893396, Jul. 2012.
[18] E. M. Vitucci, F. Fuschini, and V. Degli-Esposti, MIMO channel characterization through ray tracing simulation, presented at the 1st Eur.
Conf. Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2006), Nice, France, Nov.
610, 2006.
[19] S. Nanba, Y. Hirota, and Y. Kishi, Channel capacity estimation for
2 2 MIMO considering received power imbalance and antenna correlation, presented at the 6th Eur. Conf. Antennas and Propagation
(EuCAP 2012), Prague, Czech Republic, Mar. 2630, 2012.

[20] V. Degli-Esposti, G. Falciasecca, F. Fuschini, and E. M. Vitucci,

A meaningful indoor path-loss formula, IEEE Antennas Wireless
Propag. Lett., vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 872875, Dec. 2013.
[21] E. M. Vitucci, L. Tarlazzi, P. Faccin, and V. Degli-Esposti, Analysis
of the performance of LTE systems in an Interleaved F-DAS MIMO
Indoor environment, presented at the 5th Eur. Conf. Antennas and
Propagation (EuCAP 2011), Rome, Italy, Apr. 1115, 2011.

Enrico M. Vitucci (S04M08) received the

Laurea degree in telecommunication engineering
and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and
computer science from the University of Bologna,
Bologna, Italy, in 2003 and 2007, respectively.
He was a visiting researcher in 2007 at the Helsinki
University of Technology (TKK), now Aalto University, Finland. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at
the Center for Industrial Research on Information and
Communication Technology (CIRI-ICT), University
of Bologna. His research interests are in mobile radio
propagation, ray tracing models, MIMO channel modelling, and energy efficiency in urban areas.
Dr. Vitucci participated in the European Cooperation Actions COST 273,
COST 2100, COST IC1004, in the European Integrated Project ICT-ALPHA
and in the European Networks of Excellence NEWCOM and NEWCOM++.
He authored and co-authored more than 30 conferences and journal papers. He
also serves as reviewer for a number of international journals including several
IEEE TRANSACTIONS.

Luigi Tarlazzi received the M.Sc. degree in

telecommunication engineering from the University
of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 2006.
He is now a 4G Networks Engineer in the product
line management department of CommScopes
Distributed Coverage and Capacity Solutions
(DCCS) group, Faenza, Italy. His main role is to
oversee all the scientific aspects of next generation
mobile communication networks. He also actively
contributes to business unit decisions about any type
of 4G networks. Prior to this role, he worked in the
New Network Technologies team, providing LTE technical training to business
operations teams globally, designing MIMO-based, LTE distributed antenna
systems (DAS), and supervising LTE MIMO DAS trials around the world.
He also supports CommScope Sales teams during LTE road shows for key
customers. Prior to joining Andrew Wireless Systems (now Commscope Italy)
in 2006, he worked for Siemens COM S.p.A. in Milan, Italy, as a UTRAN
Entity Integration Testing Engineer.

Franco Fuschini was born in Bologna, Italy, in

1973. He graduated with honors in telecommunication engineering and received the Ph.D. degree in
electronics and computer science from the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in March 1999 and
in July 2003, respectively.
From 2004 to 2006 he held a post-doctoral position at the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science (DEIS) of the University of Bologna. From
2007 to 2011, he has been with the Marconi Wireless
Consortium (Italy). He is now Research Associate at
Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering G. Marconi
(DEI) at the University of Bologna. His main research interests are in the area of
radio systems design and radio propagation channel theoretical modelling and
experimental investigation.
In April 1999, he received the Marconi Foundation Young Scientist Prize
in the context of the XXV Marconi International Fellowship Award.

VITUCCI et al.: INTERLEAVED-MIMO DAS FOR INDOOR RADIO COVERAGE: CONCEPT AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Pier Faccin received the M.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Bologna,
Bologna, Italy, in the 1986.
He was a fellow Researcher at Fondazione
Guglielmo Marconi, Bologna, working on high
power modal converters for corrugated circular
waveguides. He then joined the Italian Navy Research Laboratory Giancarlo Vallauri, Livorno,
Italy, and he was involved in radar cross section
measurements of aero-naval moving targets. He
continued his career at Alcatel-Telettra, Chieti, Italy,
being involved in the R&D Laboratory dealing with military spread-spectrum
radio-communications. Upon spending some years as Hardware Designer in
the industry of professional musical keyboards, in the 1998, he joined Tekmar
SistemiAn Andrew Company, today CommScope Italy, Faenza, as Core
Technology Manager. He has been in charge of the Optical Research Department within the CommScopes Distributed Coverage and Capacity (DCCS)
Business Unit, i.e., the Group division which develops, manufactures and
install optical product such as repeaters and distribution systems that provide
radio coverage and capacity solution for wireless networks. Challenged by the
development of new applications of Radio over Fiber (RoF) technology in the
fiber distributed antenna systems (F-DAS) field of application, he introduced
the wavelength multiplexing technology inside the worlds first F-DAS commercially available. The keynote technical theme of such implementation was
the usage of the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) for optical budget
restoring. Unstoppable technology enthusiast, together with his team, later on
he pioneered and successfully introduced, the concept of interleaved multiple
inputmultiple output (i-MIMO) for a smart positioning of the antennas in
a MIMO system. More recently, he has been in charge for standardization
activities of wireless repeaters inside the 3GPP and ETSI standard organizations. Aimed with passion for technical research, outside of his engineering
activities, he continuously maintained relationships with the scientific world.
He has been invited as a speaker to several conferences at international level
and, with his team, he has been involved in the 7th European Framework
Programs ICT-ALPHA Project. A talented researcher and inventor, he has
authored and coauthored more than 40 conferences and journal papers, four
patents and patent applications on optical and wireless communications. Today
he is working as freelance telecommunication professional.

3309

Vittorio Degli-Esposti (M94) received the

Laurea degree (with honors) and the Ph.D. degree
in electronic engineering from the University of
Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1989 and in 1994,
respectively.
From 1989 to 1990, he was with Siemens Telecomunicazioni, Milan, Italy, in the microwave communications group. Since November 1994, he has been
with the Department of Electrical Engineering (DEI)
of the University of Bologna, where he is now Associate Professor and teaches courses on electromagnetics, radio propagation and wireless systems. He was a Visiting Researcher
in 1998 at the Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, USA (now NYU Polytechnic Institute) where he worked with Professor H. L. Bertoni. In 2006, he
held a visiting faculty position and taught the course Deterministic Propagation
Modeling and Ray Tracing at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK),
now Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. In 2013, he has been Visiting Professor
at Tongji University, Shanghai, China. He still has ongoing research collaborations with the above mentioned institutions and several other universities and
companies worldwide. He participated in the European Cooperation Actions
COST 231, 259, 273, 2100, and IC1004, in the European Networks of Excellence NEWCOM and NEWCOM++ in the European Project ALPHA and in
several other national and international projects. He was appointed editor of the
section on Deterministic propagation modelling of the Final Report book of
COST 273. He is author or co-author of more than 80 peer-reviewed technical
papers in the fields of applied electromagnetics, radio propagation and wireless
systems. He also serves as reviewer for a number of international journals including several IEEE TRANSACTIONS.
Prof. Degli-Esposti chaired, organized sessions and served in the Technical
Program Committees at several international conferences, including all EuCAP
editions. He has been appointed Vice-Chair of EuCAP2010 and EuCAP 2011.
He is an elected member of the Radio Propagation Board of the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EuRAAP).