Survey on 3D channel modeling : From theory to standardization

Three dimensional beamforming (3D) (also elevation beamforming) is now gaining a growing interest among researchers in wireless communication. The reason can be attributed to its potential to enable a variety of strategies like sector or user specific elevation beamforming and cell-splitting. Since this technique cannot be directly supported by current LTE releases, the 3GPP is now working on defining the required technical specifications. In particular, a large effort is currently made to get accurate 3D channel models that support the elevation dimension. This step is necessary as it will evaluate the potential of 3D beamforming techniques to benefit from the richness of real channels. This work aims at presenting the ongoing 3GPP study item ”Study on 3D-channel model for Elevation Beamforming and FD-MIMO studies for LTE”, and positioning it with respect to previous standardization works.