Performance Analysis of Carrier-Aggregated Multi-Antenna 4×4 MIMO LTE-A Fronthaul by Spatial Multiplexing on Multicore Fiber

Abstract

[EN] In this paper,we experimentally propose and evaluate the performance of multiantenna LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems implementing multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) space división multiplexing on multicore fiber, compared to single-antenna single-antenna system (SISO) transmissions. Fully standard 3GPP LTE-A cellular signals are transmitted with MIMO and carrier aggregation in radio-over-fiber over a four-core fiber in different configurations. The processing capabilities of in-built 3GPP MIMO processing are evaluated experimentally in two-antenna and four-antenna LTE-A configurations and compared with single-antenna SISO performance. The robustness of 3GPP MIMO processing is analyzed over different optical paths in a four-core fiber and the optical power margin available between the four optical paths is calculated for each configuration. Finally, the transmission performance of carrier-aggregated LTE-A signals is evaluated in the four-antenna system implementing 4×4 MIMO spatial multiplexing with different carrier separation and center frequency configurations, including regulated cellular frequencies of frequency division duplex bands 7 and 20.