On the Integration of Grassmannian Constellations into LTE Networks: a Link-level Performance Study

This paper presents Grassmannian signaling as a transmission scheme that can be integrated in Long Term Evolution (LTE) to support higher user speeds and to increase the throughput achievable in the high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) regime. This signaling is compared, under realistic channel assumptions, with the diversity transmission modes standardized in LTE, in particular, Space-Frequency Block Coding and Frequency-Switched Transmit Diversity for two and four transmit antennas, respectively. In high-speed scenarios, and even with high antenna correlation, Grassmannian signaling outperforms the LTE diversity transmission modes starting from four transmit antennas. Furthermore, in the high SNR regime, Grassmannian signaling can increase the link data rate up to 10% and 15% for two and four antennas, respectively.