19 - LTE performance verification

Summary

The LTE system requirements mandate significant improvement in performance relative to the Release 6 HSPA system. In particular, the spectrum efficiency improvement targets for the downlink are three to four times that of the Release 6 HSPA system. The spectral efficiency improvement targets for the uplink are relatively modest with two to three times improvement over Release 6 HSPA. One of the reasons for lower improvement targets for the uplink is that the same antenna configuration is assumed for the LTE system and Release 6 HSPA system. On the other hand for downlink, LTE assumes two transmit antennas while Release 6 HSPA baseline system assumes only one transmit antenna at the Node-B. Similar targets are set for the peak data rates and also cell-edge performance improvements. The spectral efficiency target for the MBSFN, which is a downlink only service, is set at an absolute number of 1 bps/Hz.

An evaluation methodology specifying the traffic models and simulation parameters was developed for assessing the performance of the LTE and Release 6 HSPA systems. The goal of the evaluation methodology is to provide a fair comparison as all the parties participating in the simulations campaign can evaluate performance under the same set of assumptions. In this chapter, we describe LTE simulations methodology and provide relative performance of the LTE system and Release 6 HSPA system.

Traffic models

In this section, we discuss various traffic models considered in the performance verification. The traffic mix scenarios are given in Table 19.1.