Adaptive Switching Between Single- or Dual-Stream Beamforming + 4-layers MU-BF
Hi,
Just wanted to share with you the results of the implementation of "Adaptive Switching Between Single- or Dual-Stream Beamforming and MIMO" & "4-Layer MU Beamforming". Great results!
* More Users
* More Traffic
* More DL Thrp
* Less Latency
Re: Adaptive Switching Between Single- or Dual-Stream Beamforming + 4-layers MU-BF
Thanks very much! Very useful. Added rep already.
Would you be so kind to share the CPE type (or types) you use this with in your network?
Another question is 4x4 MIMO. Did you seen any improvements by turning that on? I assume your network is a rural one (as ours), and we seen very minor improvements due to 4x4 MIMO (only very close and very few CPEs were able to switch to 4x4 MIMO, as there is very limited reflective paths in a rural environment), but the CRS4 extra overhead is always there. So can you shed some light to this?
Re: Adaptive Switching Between Single- or Dual-Stream Beamforming + 4-layers MU-BF
CPEs in my network:
B315s -> LTE-FDD only (doesn't support LTE-TDD B42 A.K.A. WTTx)
B612 -> LTE TDD+FDD (indoor - our main WTTx CPE)
B2338 -> LTE-TDD only (outdoor - not a single commercial user yet)
From UE traces I saw B612 is 4x4 in B42, and as our RRUs are 8x8 16w the network was already configured 4x4 before configuring BF.
As for rural area, well I live in a small country. What I call a city may be is just a small town in a developed country. With that said, everyone who can, will build their houses with concrete blocks, so in-door coverage is not the best for B42.
For me the greatest challenges have been:
*We started selling speed-based plans with unlimited volume (like 5Mbps/1Mbps all you can use + VoIP, but only that speed) without taking into consideration MBB traffic in LTE-FDD and with the B315
*For that reason, the B315 CPEs were the vast majority of the equipments, so after building WTTx has been a hell figuring out what customers are inside WTTx coverage to swap theirs CPE to B612
*Huawei is like two different companies when it comes to terminals. Indoor CPEs are handled by the same team that works with the smartphones; on the other hand, outdoor CPEs are handled by the same guys that sell us the RAN equipments. It is quite annoying having to explain the same to two teams of peaople working "for the same company"; the worst is after about a year we still have thousands of outdoor CPEs in our wharehouse.
Maybe knowing all this in advance can help you in some way. Sorry for the long post...
Re: Adaptive Switching Between Single- or Dual-Stream Beamforming + 4-layers MU-BF
Hi jkpllan3,
Thanks for the answer, but I need to get back to the 4x4 MIMO part:
Do you see large amount of customers being scheduled with 4x4 MIMO? My problem is that we tested it with B2338 (outdoor CPEs only), and the performance was far from what I expected: only a very few (usually close by) CPEs were able to be switching to 4x4, and even in this case the gain was about 30%, so not very useful for rural usecase (farms). On the other hand if you configure 4x4 MIMO but almost none of your CPEs are being able to use it, you introduce about 10-15% extra overhead on the CRS side. (CRS2 creates about 11-12% overhead, CRS4 on the other hand will do almost 25% overhead).
Maybe your network is also better off without 4x4 MIMO, just not realized it yet. What I suggest is to check how many percent of the time CPEs are scheduled with 4x4 MIMO. I would be very much interested in that info.
If you find out that the 4x4 MIMO transmission is low, you can still reconfigure to 2x2 MIMO and CRS2, and use the beamforming you explained in your first post.
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