Separate Horizontal & Vertical Codebook Based 3D

MIMO Beamforming Scheme in LTE-A Networks

Yuan Yuan, Ying Wang, Weidong Zhang, Fei Peng
Wireless Technology Innovation Institute, Key Laboratory of Universal Wireless Communication, Ministry of Education
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, P.R. China
Email: yuanyuan2011@bupt.edu.cn

AbstractTraditional two-dimensional (2D) multi-input multioutput (MIMO) beamforming technologies can only adjust the
beamformers in the horizontal dimension according to horizontal
channel information. However, due to the three-dimensional
(3D) character of the real channel, 2D MIMO beamforming
technologies can not achieve the optimal system throughput.
In this paper, a 3D MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed,
which takes into account vertical beamforming. In the proposed
scheme, we first design a codebook for Vertical dimension based
on 3D MIMO channel model; then a 3D MIMO beamforming
scheme is proposed combining the proposed vertical beamforming codebook and legacy horizontal dimension beamforming
codebook. Through simulation, we evaluate the proposed 3D
MIMO beamforming scheme and compare it with former 2D
beamforming technology. Owing to the additional spatial degrees
of freedom in vertical dimension, our 3D MIMO beamforming
scheme can effectively improve the overall system performance.

I. I NTRODUCTION
wireless communication systems are expected to
provide high data rates and a better quality of wireless
signals satisfying demanding multimedia services such as
video and teleconferencing. The so-called MIMO (multi-input
multi-output) systems, in which multiple antennas are used at
both transmitter and receiver, have been proposed to achieve
these rates due to an improvement in spectrum efficiency [1].
Traditional MIMO systems are based on 2D MIMO spatial
channel models in the sense that the double directivities of
each path/subpath are expressed only in the XY-plane.
Recently, 3D MIMO has attracted substantial research attention as an important technique to improve vertical coverage
and overall system capacity [2] [3], in which the propagating
waves are assumed to arrive not only from the azimuth plane
but also the elevation plane. The 3D MIMO channel model is
presented in [4] [5].
However, existing 2D MIMO beamforming technologies
can only be made according to horizontal dimension channel
information [6] [7] [8]. But in fact the real channel is 3D
characterized, so the 2D MIMO beamforming technologies
cannot achieve the optimal system throughput without considering vertical dimension channel information. In order to
evaluate the potential for 3D MIMO system, it is of practical
interest and importance to investigate 3D MIMO beamforming
schemes, which takes into account vertical dimension channel
information in 3D space. However, there is few papers discuss
about it until now.

UTURE

In this paper, we propose a 3D MIMO beamforming

scheme. First, a DFT-based beamforming codebook is designed for Vertical dimension, which is similar to the legacy
2D MIMO DFT-based codebook design. Further, we decide
codebook size according to the elevation angle distribution
in the vertical direction and simulation results. Then the 3D
MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed, in which 3D MIMO
channel are decomposed into a couple of 2D MIMO channel
for consideration. Although it is a suboptimal spatial pattern,
legacy codebook design criterion and feedback mechanism
defined in Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) Release
10/11 can be reused. In this case, a couple of PMI (HorizontalPMI and Vertical-PMI) needs to be feedback to measure a
3D channel model. We make 3D MIMO beamforming by
combining horizontal and vertical dimension beamforming
according to the PMIs. Finally, performances of our proposed
3D MIMO beamforming scheme and traditional 2D MIMO
beamforming are compared, and the results are analysed.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents the 3D MIMO channel model. Section III describes
the DFT-based beamforming codebook design for Vertical
dimension and presents the 3D MIMO beamforming schemes.
Section IV makes comparison of average cell spectral efficiency with different vertical beamforming codebook size N and
decide the optimum codebook size. Simulation results of proposed 3D MIMO beamforming scheme are also presented and
compared with traditional 2D MIMO beamforming scheme in
this section. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section V.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
This section presents a 2D MIMO spatial channel model
(SCM) in [9] and the 3D MIMO channel model, respectively.
A. 2D Simplified SCM Model
A simplified sketch of the SCM model is given in Fig.1.
It does not consider the elevation spectrum; therefore, it is
defined for the 2D case. The SCM considers N clusters
of scatters and each simulation, or drop, varies the cluster
statistics and array orientations. A cluster corresponds to a
separate path and within the path, there are M unresolvable
subpaths ( M equals 20 for SCM).
For an S element linear BS array and a U element linear
MS array, the 2D channel coefficients for one of N multipath components are given by a U -by-S matrix of complex

978-1-4673-6187-3/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE


hu,s,n (t) =


M
Pn SF 

M m=1


h3D
u,s,n (t)

Pn SF
M

(v)

BS (n,m,AoD )
(h)
BS (n,m,AoD )

T 

(v,v)

exp(jn,m )

(h,v)
rn2 exp(jn,m )

(v,h)

rn1 exp(jn,m )
(h,h)
exp(jn,m )



(v)

M S (n,m,AoA )
(h)
M S (n,m,AoA )

exp(j20 1 ds sin(n,m,AoD )) exp(j20 1 du sin(n,m,AoA )) exp(j2vn,m t)







T
(v,v)
(v,h)
1
(v)
exp
j
k
exp
j
n,m
n,m
n,m
F
(
,

)
BS,s n,m n,m






(h)

(h,v)
(h,h)
1
FBS,s (n,m , n,m )

kn,m exp jn,m

exp jn,m




.
(v)
FM S,u (n,m , n,m )

m=1

(h)

FM S,u (n,m , n,m )





1
1

exp j20 rs n,m exp j20 ru n,m exp (j2vn,m t)

(1)

(2)

amplitudes. We denote the 2D channel matrix for the nth

multipath component (n = 1, , N ) as H2D
n (t). The (u, s)th
component (u = 1, , U ; s = 1, , S) of H2D
n (t) denoted
(t), can be written as (1), with the 2D superscript
as h2D
u,s,n
indicating wave propagation in two dimensions, n,m,AoD and
n,m,AoA denote the azimuth angle of departure (AAoD) and
elevation angle of departure (EAoD) for the mth subpath of
the nth path in 2D MIMO channel model, respectively.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 1.

Simplified SCM model for 2-D case

[9]

B. 3D SCM Model
In 3D channel modeling, the departure and arrival angles
have to be modeled using not only the azimuth angle in XYplane, but also the elevation angle with respect to the Z axis
[2], [10], [11]. A spherical coordinate system for 3D channel
model is shown in Fig.2. In this case, the 2D channel modeling
expressed in (1) can be straightforwardly extended to the 3D
case, as shown in (2).
(v)
(h)
Where FBS,s (n,m , n,m ) and FBS,s (n,m , n,m ) are complex field patterns of the sth transmit antenna at BS for V
polarization and H polarization,respectively; the symbols n,m
and n,m denote the azimuth angle of departure (AAoD) and
elevation angle of departure (EAoD) for the mth subpath
of the nth path, respectively; rs = [xs , ys , zs ] is the vector
denoting the position of the sth transmit antenna at BS in

(v)

Spherical coordinate system for 3-D model

[2]

(h)

3D space; FM S,u (n,m , n,m ) and FM S,u (n,m , n,m ) are

complex field patterns of the uth receive antenna at UE for V
polarization and H polarization,respectively; the symbols n,m
and n,m denote the azimuth angle of arrival (AAoA) and
elevation angle of arrival (EAoA) for the mth subpath of the
nth path, respectively; ru is the vector denoting the position of
n,m and
n,m
the uth transmit antenna at UE in 3D space;
are the unit vectors denoting the 3D direction of departure
wave and arrival wave for the mth subpath of the nth path,
respectively; vn,m denote the doppler frequency shift, which
is obtained by the azimuth angle of arrival n,m , the elevation
angle of arrival n,m and the angle of the MS velocity vector
v .
III. 3D MIMO B EAMFORMING S CHEME
A 3D MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed in this
section. First, a DFT-based beamforming codebook is designed for Vertical dimension beamforming; then 3D MIMO

beamforming is made by combining horizontal dimension

beamforming and Vertical dimension beamforming in some
way.
A. Vertical Beamforming Codebook Design
To measure a 3D channel model accurately, we need to
feedback a couple of 2D PMIs for horizontal dimension
and vertical dimension. Existing codebook is designed for
2D MIMO horizontal dimension, so a codebook must be
designed for vertical dimension beamforming. Independent
codebook designs for horizontal and vertical dimensions can
be supported by a dimension flag indicated in the CSI-RS
configuration signaling.
The DFT-based beamforming weight-vector codebook is
considered as an effective design for spatially correlated channels. The LTE standard favours the Discrete Fourier Transform
(DFT) based codebook proposed in [12] [13] for its simplicity,
whose beamforming weight-vector codewords are actually
permuted columns of a DFT matrix. Therefore we propose
to adopt the DFT-based beamforming codebook for vertical
dimension codebook design as well.
The DFT-based codebook is constructed as follows, which
is defined in [14]:



g
,
Pg (m, n) = 1M exp j 2
Mm n+ G

The comparision of horizontal and vertical codebook in 3D

MIMO channel is presented in Table I.
TABLE I
HORIZONTAL/VERTICAL CODEBOOK COMPARISION
Horizontal Codebook

Vertical Codebook

Codebook

DFT-based codebook

DFT-based codebook

Spread Angles

0 180

Codebook Size N

N = 16

N =8

Feedback overhead

4 bits

3 bits

360

B. 3D MIMO Beamforming Scheme

A 3D MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed, in which

3D MIMO channel are decomposed into a couple of 2D
MIMO channels for consideration. Although it is a suboptimal
spatial pattern, legacy codebook design criterion and feedback
mechanism defined in LTE-A Release 10/11 can be reused.
Step 1:Independent horizontal and vertical 2D MIMO CSI
measurements are made to feedback a couple of PMIs to
measure a 3D channel model.
The independent 2D MIMO horizontal channel matrix for
the nth multipath component (n = 1, , N ) is defined
2D
m = 0, 1, M 1; n = 0, 1, M 1; g = 0, 1, G 1. as Hn (t) in section II. The (u, s)th component (s =
2D
(3) 1, , S; u = 1, , U ) of H2D
n (t) is given by hu,s,n (t),
where Pg (m, n) is the gth DFT precoding matrix, every which is presented in formula (1).
The horizontal 2D PMI can be selected from legacy codecolumn of a DFT matrix corresponds to the beamforming
weight-vector of antenna, M denotes the number of transmit book according to the 2D horizontal channel coefficient matrix
antennas and G denotes the number of DFT precoding matrix, given above and feedback to BS.
Similar to formula (1), we can denote the independent 2D
which decide the codebook size N . For the codebook with G
precoding matrix and M vector in each matrix, the codebook MIMO vertical channel matrix for the nth multipath comsize will be G M , e.g. when the number of transmit antennas ponent (n = 1, , N ) as HVn (t). The (u, s)th component
(u = 1, , U ; s = 1, , S) of HVn (t) is given by
M =4, G=2, then the codebook size N = 2 4 = 8.
As mentioned above, in a DFT-based beamforming codehVu,s,n (t)
T

book, every column of a DFT matrix corresponds to the beam
(v)
M


(
)
n,m,AoD
forming weight-vector of antenna. When the channels are high
SF
BS
= PnM
(h)
spatially correlated, every column codebook can corresponds
BS (n,m,AoD )
m=1
to an beamformed angle. The larger the codebook, the more



(v,v)
(v,h)
and finer corresponding angles. However, we need to feedback
exp(jn,m )
rn1 exp(jn,m )

more bits with lager codebook which leads more system
(h,v)
(h,h)
rn2 exp(jn,m )
exp(jn,m )
overhead. Hence we should make the best selection of the


codebook size N for vertical dimension considering tradeoff
(v)

(
)
n,m,AoA
between beamforming accuracy and feedback overhead.
MS

(h)
In fact, different from horizontal dimension, angles spread in
M S (n,m,AoA )
vertical dimension is much smaller. More specifically, in UMi
Scenario, users spread over 0 360 in horizontal dimension
exp(jkds sin(n,m,AoD )) exp(jkdu sin(n,m,AoA ))
but only 0 180 in vertical dimension. With the change of
cell radius and antenna height, the range in vertical dimension
exp(j2vn,m t).
(4)
may even be less. For this reason, there is no need to feedback
the same bits for vertical dimension as horizontal dimension. n,m,AoD and n,m,AoA denote the elevation angle of deparSimulation results with different codebook size N will be ture (EAoD) and elevationh angle of arrival (EAoA).
given in Section IV, which decides the optimum codebook
The vertical 2D PMI can also be selected from the codebook
size N for vertical dimension should be equal to 8 in UMi which is proposed in this paper according to the 2D vertical
scenario.
channel coefficient matrix given above and feedback to BS.

Step 2:Using the independent horizontal and vertical 2D

MIMO PMIs reported from MS, 3D MIMO beamforming
is made by combining two independent precoding matrices
represented by the horizontal & vertical PMI.
In this paper, we assume that the base station is equipped
with 4 transmit antennas and the MT with 4 receive antennas, hence we can transmit four data streams at most. In a
horizontal 2D MIMO system, we assume that transmitter only
transmits two streams, which are mapped to four antennas
through a 4 2 horizontal precoding matrix.
The input-output relationship can be expressed as:
42 21
+n
y41 = H44
2D W2D x


x
1
44
42
= H2D W2D
+ n,
x2

H44
2D

(5)
42
W2D

is the 2D MIMO channel matrix and

is
where
the horizontal MIMO precoding matrix.
Whereas in 3D MIMO system, owing to the additional
spatial degrees of freedom in Vertical dimension, we can
transmit more data streams which can be mapped to antennas
by Vertical precoding matrix as well. Then we can assume that
transmitter can transmit four streams in a 3D MIMO system,
two more streams than in horizontal 2D MIMO system. Using
the proposed 3D MIMO precoding matrix which is composited
of horizontal precoding matrix and vertical precoding matrix,
the input-output relationship can be expressed as
 42

WV42 x41 + n
y41 = H44
3D WH

x1
 42
 x2

WV42
= H44
3D WH
x3 + n
x4





x1
x3
44
42
42
= H3D WH
+ WH
+ n,
x2
x4
(6)

TABLE II
SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Parameters

Assumption

Network layout

19 sites, 3 sectors per site

Traffic Model

Full Buffer

ISD

500m

Load

10 UE per sector

Carrier frequency

2.0GHz

Bandwidth

10MHz

Channel model

ITU, Umi, 2D and 3D channel

UE speed

3 km/h

Antenna configuration

Tx: Nt = 4, ULA with 0.5 spaced

Scheduler

Proportional Fair

UE Receiver

MMSE

Rx: Nr = 4

Fig. 3.

Average cell spectral efficiency for different vertical codebook size

Fig. 4.

CDF curves of spectral efficiency for 3D/2D beamforming schemes

where H44
3D is the 3D MIMO channel matrix which we de42
is the horizontal MIMO precoding
scribed in section II. WH
42
matrix and WV is the vertical MIMO precoding matrix.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
This section presents simulation results with different vertical beamforming codebook size to decide optimum codebook
size of vertical beamforming codebook and evaluates the
performance of the proposed 3D MIMO beamforming scheme
presented in Section III.
The system performance is evaluated by means of systemlevel simulations using 3GPP LTE-Advanced evaluation
methodologies [15]. We mainly consider the typical deployment scenarios UMi. Table II gives the main system level
simulation parameter configuration.
Fig.3 make comparision of cell throughout with different
vertical beamformer codebook size. We can see that the
codebook size N increases from 4 to 8, the performance is
improved, however, when larger codebook size 16 is used, The
performance is similar to the performance with codebook size

8. Therefore, the codebook size 8 should be the best selection

for vertical beamformer codebook with considering tradeoff
between performance and feedback overhead.
Fig.4 compares the performance of our 3D MIMO beam-

V. C ONCLUSION
In this work, we have investigated the 3D MIMO beamforming problem. A DFT-based beamforming codebook is
designed for vertical dimension and vertical codebook size
is decided according to the elevation angle distribution in
the vertical direction and simulation results. In particular, a
3D MIMO beamforming scheme is proposed to improve the
overall system capacity. By considering the additional spatial
degrees of freedom in Vertical dimension, we can transmit
more data streams at BS. Numerical results showed that our
proposed 3D MIMO beamforming scheme can reasonably
improve the overall system capacity performance compared
with conventional 2D MIMO beamforming.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Fig. 5.

Cell-average spectral efficiency for 3D/2D beamforming schemes

This research is supported by National Key Project

(2013ZX03003009), National Nature Science Foundation of
China (NSF61121001), PCSIRT (No.IRT1049)
R EFERENCES

Fig. 6.

Cell-edge spectral efficiency for 3D/2D beamforming schemes

forming scheme and traditional 2D MIMO codebook-based

beamforming. We can see that the gain achieved by our 3D
MIMO beamforming scheme can be as large as 3-4dB compared with traditional 2D MIMO beamforming. This confirms
the effectiveness of the 3D MIMO beamforming scheme. This
is because our 3D MIMO beamforming scheme can distinguish data streams in both horizontal dimension and vertical
dimension, but traditional 2D MIMO beamforming can only
distinguish data streams in horizontal dimension. So we can
transmit more data streams by using proposed 3D MIMO
beamforming scheme without introducing severe interference.
Therefore our 3D MIMO beamforming scheme has a better
performance than traditional 2D MIMO beamforming.
Fig.5 and Fig.6 shows the cell-average spectral efficiency
and cell-edge spectral efficiency of our 3D MIMO beamforming scheme and traditional 2D MIMO beamforming scheme
in UMi scenario. We can observe that, 2D MIMO can already
meet all the ITU requirement, but the proposed 3D MIMO
beamforming scheme further improves the performance. The
performance gain can be 13%.

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