Analysis of CQI traces from LTE MIMO deployments and impact on classical schedulers

Abstract

This paper deals with the classical problem of radio resource management in LTE MIMO, with special focus to the specific radio channel characteristics in commercial LTE networks. First, we provide some conclusions about the Channel Quality Information traces obtained through field testing. From this analysis, we perform a series of experiments by means of an LTE emulator in order to evaluate the accuracy of different fading models used in the 3GPP. As a first outcome of the paper, we infer several fine-grain channel characteristics useful to feed further research work in the area of LTE MIMO. As a second contribution of the paper, we analyze the performance of classical schedulers (i.e., Round Robin, Best CQI and Proportional Fair) under the obtained LTE MIMO channel conditions. Specifically, we analyze the impact of the channel feedback reporting rate in scenarios with multiple greedy sources.