Streaming Video Capacity Comparisons of Multi-Antenna LTE Systems

The 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release-8 specifications are designed to deliver higher peak data rates, higher throughput and lower air-interface latency compared to 2G and 3G systems. This higher performance will make it possible to support more demanding applications beyond web-browsing and voice, requiring higher data rates and stricter QoS constraints. Video services are becoming increasingly popular over the Internet indicating that the demand for such high data-rate video applications over cellular wireless will continue to grow. However, in order to make these services commercially viable in a LTE system it is necessary for the air-interface to deliver high quality services to a significant number of users simultaneously. In this paper we investigate the video capacity of a LTE air-interface using realistic video traffic models. An LTE air-interface can support multiple-antenna transmit arrays and several multiple antenna transmission modes to increase system capacity. We investigate the benefits of using 4 transmit antennas compared to 2 transmit antennas on the video capacity of an LTE system. The results from our investigation indicate that the capacity benefits with 4 transmit antennas are much higher with video services than those observed with other traffic models such as the full-buffer traffic model. The results also show that a 10MHz TDD LTE system can service upto 48 users per sector with 256Kbps video streams in the downlink indicating that such services can be commercially viable.