Analysis of LTE Radio Parameters in Different Environments and Transmission Modes Nafiz Imtiaz Bin Hamid * , Nafiu Salele, Mugumya Twarik Harouna, Rammah Muhammad Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Islamic University of Technology (IUT), Board Bazar, Gazipur-1704, Bangladesh. * E-mail: nimtiaz@iut-dhaka.edu Abstract— The ever-growing need for higher data transmission capacity drives the network service providers to build cellular Long term evolution (LTE) networks in urban areas. 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE is the evolution of the UMTS in response to the ever-increasing demand for high speed data and high quality multimedia broadcast services. LTE promises to deliver an unrivalled user experience with ultrafast broadband and very low latency and at the same time, a very compelling business proposition for operators with flexible spectrum bandwidth, smooth migration and the ability to deliver low cost per bit voice and data services. LTE is designed to have wider channels up to 20 MHz, with low latency and packet optimized radio access technology. The peak data rate envisaged for LTE is 100 Mbps in downlink and 50 Mbps in the uplink. LTE has many promising features like bandwidth scalability. It is developed to support both the time division duplex as well as frequency division duplex mode. This paper provides analyses of the performance of radio parameters required for efficient LTE radio planning through numerous simulations in different transmission modes and radio environments. It mainly highlights the throughput and Blok Error Rate (BLER) with respect to Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) on the physical layer and in network context through different simulation environments. Keywords— LTE, BLER, SNR, CQI, Throughput I. INTRODUCTION LTE is a 3GPP standard considered a major advancement in wireless technology. It is expected to be the mobile broadband platform for services in innovation for the foreseeable future [1]. LTE is a fourth generation technology envisaged to provide a peak data rate of 100Mbps in the downlink and 50Mbps in the uplink. It is designed to have wider channels up to 20MHz, with packet optimized radio access technology. LTE has very promising features for example high scalability, Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) duplexing mode. To meet the user’s expectations, LTE aims at better spectral flexibility, higher data rates, low latency, improved coverage and better battery lifetime. To achieve these targets, mainly three enabling technologies are employed namely; Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). LTE employs OFDMA in the downlink direction and SC-FDMA in the uplink data transmissions [2],[3]. To substantially enhance the air interface, MIMO employs multiple transmit and receive antennas, for higher data rates and fight against multi path fading. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section II contains the brief summary of related works. In Section III an overview of transmission modes has been given. Afterwards, the uses of the link level and system level simulations are presented in Section IV. In Section V, link and system level simulation results and their analyses have been given. II. RELATED WORKS Similar works using link level results include: SNR to Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) mapping for different MIMO settings [4], limiting downlink Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) retransmission in poor link [5]. Radio network planning for Dhaka city- coverage and capacity analysis approach has been suitably presented in [6], [7]. An open-source framework is presented to provide a complete performance verification of LTE networks in [8]. But none of those had the clear motive to thoroughly investigate the LTE radio parameters in different transmission modes and environments running simulation [9] with numerous different settings. So, this has been chosen as the focus of this paper as it will further improve the network planning issue of LTE. III. TRANSMISSION MODES During dynamic resource scheduling, suitable transmission mode can be adapted semi-statically according to various channel conditions. Physical Downlink Shared Channel (PDSCH) channel employs different transmission modes utilizing multiple antennas in both transmitting and receiving sides. Till now nine transmission modes have been released but only first four have been implemented [2]. The nine transmission modes are: 1. Single antenna; port 0, 2. Transmit diversity, 3. Open loop spatial multiplexing, 4. Closed loop spatial multiplexing, 5. MU-MIMO, 6. Closed loop rank=1 precoding, 7. Single antenna; port 5, 8. Dual layer transmission; port 7 and 8 and 9. Up to 8 layer transmission; port 7-14. 1st International Conference on Electrical Information and Communication Technology (EICT 2013) 13-15 February 2014, Khulna-9203, Bangladesh 978-1-4799-2299-4/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 385