3D Extension of the 3GPP/ITU Channel Model

Recently there have been proposals to extend MIMO processing to the elevation dimension in addition to the azimuth direction. To accurately assess the promised gains of these ?3D-MIMO? techniques, a channel model is needed that accurately accounts for the elevation angles of the rays. In addition it would be desirable for the 3D channel model to be a simple extension of an already defined 2D channel model to allow for ease of implementation and to assist the 3GPP standardization effort in the 3D MIMO area. In this paper we propose an extension of the ITU 2D channel model to 3D by adding a distance dependent elevation spread based on observations from ray tracing. Through system-level simulations we observe that the behavior of 3D MIMO is greatly impacted by the modeling of the 3D channel.