Analytical Evaluation of an IMT-Advanced Compliant LTE System Level Simulator

LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) proposed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has successfully applied to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2010 to be accepted as an IMT-Advanced (IMT-A) compliant 4G mobile radio system. As part of this application 3GPP has provided LTE-A system level simulation results for cell spectral efficiency and cell edge user spectral efficiency. The ITU-R has encouraged independent evaluation groups to mutually verify their simulation results using their own simulators. Any simulator implementations is credible only if it is verified with regard to correct behaviour and correct assumptions. In this work we present a method to analytically derive the spectral efficiency, throughput distribution, and cell edge user spectral efficiency results for LTE-A in an IMT-A scenario. The method can be used to estimate performance gains of protocol improvements and to validate system level simulators for IMT-A compliant LTE-A evaluation.