China Mobile has verified multiple core TD-LTE-Advanced technologies including FDD/TDD Carrier Aggregation, MSA, 256QAM, inter-site CoMP, and MU-MIMO in field tests conducted in partnership with Chengdu Electronic Technology University and Huawei.
Huawei said this pre-commercial verification of 3GPP R12 technologies marks a milestone in improving the entire TD-LTE network performance and user peak throughput. Some highlights of the testing:
- LTE TDD & FDD Carrier Aggregation (CA) testing enabled China Mobile and Huawei to validate the CA peak throughput by considering a scenario where LTE TDD is the primary cell and LTE FDD is the secondary cell. The air interface test results reached the theoretical peak data rate corresponding to a used network configuration of 250 Mbps.
- LTE Multi-Stream Aggregation (MSA) between TD-LTE and LTE FDD sites were both tested, with the results showing flexible handover or traffic concurrency for users, based on network coverage, load and interference.
- MU-MIMO was validated with four data streams based on an 8-antenna network, which resulted in a peak data rate improvement of 100%. The test result for inter-site CoMP on a PTN-based network also showed a 30% increase in throughput for cell edge users.
- TD-LTE indoor and outdoor testing was done with 256QAM. Compared to 64QAM, 256QAM enables a 33% peak data rate gain, and a cell average performance improvement of more than 20% in an indoor test environment.