Integrating 3D Channel Model and Grid of Beams for 5G mMIMO System Level Simulations

Massive MIMO (mMIMO) antenna array and Grid of Beams (GoB) are one of the key components for 5G to achieve high spectral efficiency and coverage. System level simulations are necessary to optimally intergrate the components of 5G system. Simulations with mMIMO antenna array involve handling large matrices, which results in increased simulation time typically upto several days depending on the size of the antenna array. However, GoB are fixed wideband beams and the receiver sees only the effective channel which is a combination of the channel and the GoB. Therefore, for system level simulations it is sufficient to general only the effective channel. In this paper, we propose a simulation model to directly generate the effective channel based on the 3GPP 3D channel model. It is shown that for the simulation of urban macro cells scenario specified in TR 38.913, the computational effort can be reduced by a factor of 1000. Furthermore, simulations show that very high SINR and user throughput values are achievable through GoB.