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Preben Mogensen (1,2), Wei Na (1), István Z. Kovács (2), Frank Frederiksen (2) Akhilesh Pokhariyal
(1), Klaus I. Pedersen (2), Troels Kolding (2), Klaus Hugl (3), and Markku Kuusela (3)
(1) Aalborg University, Denmark
(2) Nokia Networks – Aalborg, Denmark
(3) Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland
Abstract— In this paper we propose a modification to Shannon combined with the G-factor distribution to predict LTE cell
capacity bound in order to facilitate accurate benchmarking of level spectral efficiency (SE). The G-factor distribution is
UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE). The method is generally defined as the average own cell power to the other-cell power
applicable to wireless communication systems, while we have used plus noise ratio. With OFDMA in a wide system bandwidth
LTE air-interface technology as a case study. We introduces an
this corresponds to the average wideband signal to interference
adjusted Shannon capacity formula, where we take into account
the system bandwidth efficiency and the SNR efficiency of LTE. plus noise power ratio (SINR).We compare such predicted
Separating these issues, allows for simplified parameter LTE cell SE to similar results generated by an advanced quasi-
extraction. We show that the bandwidth efficiency can be static system level simulator. In the presented study we have
calculated based on system parameters, while the SNR efficiency used LTE downlink as an example, but the method is general
is extracted from detailed link level studies including advanced and can be applied to other cellular wireless communications
features of MIMO and frequency domain packet scheduling systems with fast link adaptation; e.g. HSPA and WIMAX.
(FDPS). We then use the adjusted Shannon capacity formula The organization of the paper is as follows: In Section II we
combined with G-factor distributions for macro and micro cell give a short overview of the LTE performance requirements
scenarios to predict LTE cell spectral efficiency (SE). Such LTE
and continue with a short overview of the LTE air-interface
SE predictions are compared to LTE cell SE results generated by
system level simulations. The results show an excellent match of technology. In Section III we propose the modification to the
less that 5-10% deviation. Shannon formulation and discuss how parameters relate to real
system parameters. Before drawing conclusions in Section V,
Index Terms—OFDMA, MIMO, Shannon Capacity, Wireless we conduct verification benchmarking of the proposed method
system and link performance, LTE. with system simulations SE results in Section IV.
III. SHANNON CAPACITY FITTING Further, at the system level, we have additional overhead
related to common control channels, such as synchronization
Recall the SISO Shannon capacity formula for the
and broadcast channels. However, the more essential control
theoretical channel spectral efficiency as a function of SNR:
signaling overhead in LTE is related to the shared control
S max (bits/s/Hz) = log 2 (1 + SNR ) (1) channel: To support fast frequency domain link adaptation and
This formula is valid for infinite delay and infinite code block scheduling, a non-negligible signaling overhead is related to
size in an AWGN channel [4]. For general MIMO with perfect the dynamic assignment of resources for each 1ms TTI. This
transmitted knowledge, the Shannon capacity is [5]: overhead depends on the number of users to be simultaneously
min (nT ,nR ) (2) scheduled in a cell. The overhead listed in Table 2 corresponds
S max (bits/s/Hz) = ∑
k =1
log 2 (1 + SNRk ) to a simultaneously scheduling in the order of 10 users in 10
MHz, which give almost full FDPS gain [6].
Here nT and nR denote the number of transmit and receive Including the additional system level overhead, the LTE
antennas respectively and SNRk denotes the resulting SNR of bandwidth efficiency of the shared data-channel becomes 57%
the kth spatial sub-channel which is influenced by the (54% for MIMO). It is thus outmost important to consider
eigenvalue, the noise/interference, as well as the allocated system BW efficiency when using Shannon to estimate the
transmit power on that sub-channel. The Shannon Capacity system performance of LTE; Otherwise the estimated results
bound in Eq (1) can not be reached in practice due to several will be approx. a factor of x2 off from reality!
implementation issues. To represent these loss mechanisms B. SNR efficiency
accurately, we use a modified Shannon capacity formula: Full SNR efficiency is not plausible in LTE due to limited
S(bits/s/Hz) = BW _ eff ⋅η ⋅ log 2 (1 + SNR / SNR _ eff ) (3) code block length. The transport block size in LTE is confined
Here BW_eff adjusts for the system bandwidth (BW) efficiency to 1 ms and the actual transport block size depends further on
of LTE and SNR_eff adjusts for the SNR implementation the link adaptation and scheduling decision. As earlier
efficiency of LTE. The factor η is a correction factor which discussed there are also hard restrictions to the maximum
nominally should be equal to one. However, we shall discuss spectral efficiency from the supported modulation, coding and
its convenient use later in Section II.B. Furthermore we upper MIMO modes, see Table 1. Furthermore there are performance
limit S according to the hard spectral efficiency given by MCS, aspects related to receiver algorithms (linear, non-linear etc).
e.g. 64QAM, Rate 4/5 for the single stream case. In other words, the SNR efficiency is much more complicated
to analytically compute than the bandwidth efficiency. Hence,
A. System bandwidth efficiency the value for SNR_eff in Eq. (3), we extract by using curve
The bandwidth efficiency of LTE is reduced by several fitting to link-level simulation results.
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The simulation and fitting results for an AWGN channel are steadily increases due to using higher order modulation and
shown in Fig. 1. We have shown the simulated link adaptation higher coding rates; Turbo-decoding performance reduces
curve for LTE assuming the MCS steps given in Table 1. In significantly with the higher variability, and hence the SNR_eff
the fitting, we extract the best value for SNR_eff using the increases significantly.
setting for BW_eff of 0.83 obtained from Table 2. For all
figures in this paper, the Shannon fitting parameters are
Table 3. Gain mechanisms of various LTE DL antenna
indicated in parenthesis as (BW_eff*η, SNR_eff). We can
configurations.
observe that LTE is performing less than 1.6~2 dB off from MIMO Tx Rx Diversity Array Effective
the Shannon capacity bound. As can be seen, there is Schemes Ant. Ant. Order Gain Spatial
nevertheless a minor discrepancy in both ends of the G-factor (dB) streams
dynamic range. The reason for this is that the SNR_eff is not SISO (1x1) 1 1 1 0dB 1
constant but changes with G-factor. It is shown later that we SIMO (1x2) 1 2 2 3dB 1
can circumvent this G-factor dependency on the parameters by SFC (2x2) 2 2 4 3dB 1
CLM1 (2x2) 2 2 4 4.6dB 1
using the fudge factor η. For AWGN, η=0.9
BLAST (2x2, 2 2 1 -3dB 2
(BW_eff*η=0.75) and SNR_eff =1.25~1dB provides the best fit LMMSE)*
to the link adaptation curve. *: the array gain of -3dB can be theoretically up to 0dB if ideal nonlinear
interference cancellation receiver is used. Only valid for high G-factor
5
4.5 LTE AWGN
4 Shannon(0,83; 1,6) 15
3.5 A W GN
SE [bit/s/Hz/cell]
Shannon(0,75; 1,25)
3 S IS O_TU
2.5
S IM O_TU
2 10 S FC_TU
SNR_eff [dB]
1.5
CLM1_TU
1
0.5
0 5
-5 0 5 10 15 20
G-Factor [dB]
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are significantly worsened compared to AWGN: the BW_eff
*η has reduced from 0.83 to 0.56 (η=0.6) and the SNR_eff 5.0000
LTE SIMO RR
parameter is increased from 1.6~2dB dB to 2~3dB. 4.5000
LTE SIMO (FDPS)
From Fig. 3, it can also be observed that the combined array 4.0000
LTE SIMO (TDPS)
& diversity gain of 1x2 SIMO is approx 4-5 dB over SISO, 5-6 3.5000
Shannon(0,62; 1,8)
dB for 2x2 SFC, and approximately 7-8 dB for 2x2 CLM1.
SE [bit/s/Hz]
3.0000
Shannon(0,67; 0,78)
Comparing these results to Table 3, the gain from diversity 2.5000
Shannon(0,83; 1,6)
order 2 is approx 1-2 dB and approx. 2-3 dB for diversity order 2.0000
4. For BLAST, we selected to model the performance as two 1.5000
curves: For G < 10 we use SFC fitting parameters and for
1.0000
G>10 we use the SISO fitting parameters, but changing from 1
0.5000
to 2 spatial streams according to Table 3. The mach is not
perfect but sufficiently close for practical purpose. 0.0000
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 20
8,0000
LTE SISO
G-Factor [dB]
LTE SIMO
7,0000
LTE SFC
LTE BLAST
Fig. 4. LTE SE for 1x2 MRC with round robin (RR), time-domain
6,0000 LTE CLM1 (TDPS), and time/frequency-domain packet scheduling (FDPS).
Shannon(0,56; 2)
Shannon(0,62;1,8)
5,0000 Shannon(0,62;1,4) Table 4. Summary of best Shannon fit parameters (BW_eff*η,
Shannon(0,66; 1,1) SNR_eff), Eq. (3).
G>10: Shannon(0,56; 2)
bit/s/Hz
1,0000
SIMO (0,62; 1,8) (0,67; 0,78) 3dB 1
2x2 SFC (0,62; 1,4) 3dB 1
(0.65;0.95)
0,0000
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 2x2 CLM1 (0,65; 1,6) 4.6dB 1
(0.66;0.9)
G-factor [dB]
2x2 (0,56;2) -3dB 2
Fig. 3. SE for SISO(1x1), SIMO(1x2), SFC (2x2), BLAST (2x2) and na
BLAST*
CLM1(2x2), as a function of G-Factor. The best Shannon fit curves
are plotted with parameters (BW_eff*η, SNR_eff), Eq. (3).
IV. LTE SYSTEM CAPACITY ESTIMATION.
C. Fast packet scheduling
In the previous Sections, we have captured the performance of
Fast Time and Frequency Domain Packet Scheduling LTE in terms of the link SE versus G-factor including
(FDPS) is a feature in LTE to obtain multi-user diversity [2]. essential features such as multi-antenna and multi-user
Fig. 4 shows the SIMO link performance of LTE for Round scheduling gains, see Table 4. To map these results to system
Robin (RR) and time-domain packet scheduling (TDPS) based level performance, we need to consider the G-factor
on the proportional fair (PF) principle [6] plus the PF-based distribution, PDF(G), over the cell area. Assuming uniform
FDPS [6]. The user diversity order (UDO) is 10 for TDPS and user distribution, the obtained G-factors for the LTE capacity
FDPS. For reference purpose we also show the Shannon fit for evaluation are plotted in Figure 5.
AWGN; “Shannon(0.83, 1.6)”. The distributions are obtained by deploying Macro Cell and
A significant gain from FDPS over RR can be identified, Micro Cell hexagonal cellular layouts according to [2]. The
while TDPS provides relatively less gain due to a large system mapping from the Shannon SE curves and G-factor
bandwidth relative to the coherence bandwidth. The gain of distribution to cell capacity can be written as:
∞
FDPS over RR of 4.5-5 dB comes from the user selection
diversity providing an “array gain” since each UE is allocated
Cell _ SE = ∫ SE (G) * PDF (G )dG ,
−∞
(4)
only on the best 1/UDO of the bandwidth on average. where the SE as a function of G SE(G) is computed from Eq.
Simultaneously, FDPS also reduces the SNR variability across (3) (also applying a hard limitation on maximum SE due to
the OFDM symbol to one user, which improves the Turbo- MCS limitations). The probability density function of G is
decoding performance and hence the SNR_eff. The parameters obtained from Figure 5. It is assumed that all users have equal
for the best Shannon fit curves for the different considered session times (e.g. infinite buffer assumption). Using Eq. (3)
antenna schemes in combination with RR and FDPS for multi-cell scenario presumes further that other-cell
combinations are summarized in Table 4. interference can be modeled as AWGN. In terms of cell SE,
this assumption is conservative, as it does not consider receiver
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structure with the capability to cancel or reject other-cell results from Eq. (4), both when using “Shannon fit” and “Link
interference. results”. The results for Macro cell scenario case #1 are almost
fits within +/- 5%, whereas we observed up to 10% difference
for the micro-cell scenario (not shown in the plot).
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have assessed the performance of LTE DL
including the effects of system bandwidth efficiency and the
SNR efficiency. This was done for both AWGN, and for the
TU channel including features of advanced antenna techniques
and fast time and frequency domain packet scheduling (FDPS).
The link-level results show that LTE DL with ideal channel
estimation performs only approx 2dB from Shannon Capacity
in AWGN, whereas the deviation between Shannon and LTE
become much larger for a TU fading channel even for the
SIMO case. We show that FDPS compensates for the fading
loss by providing multi-user diversity gain. We furthermore
demonstrate that cell capacity results can be accurately
estimated from the suggested modified Shannon formula and a
Fig. 5. G-factor CDFs for different evaluation scenarios for DL LTE. G-Factor distribution according to a certain cellular scenario.
Thus, the Shannon fit method can be applied to fast prediction
of the cell SE including various features and aspects not
2
considered in the paper; Such as: Higher order sectorization
1,8 System simulation Shannon fit (Table 4) Link results (Fig. 2)
(change G-Factor distribution), or to include loss from real
1,6
channel estimation (change of Shannon fit parameter).
1,4
1,2
REFERENCES
SE [bps/Hz]
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