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
these techniques 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 and FD(Full Dimensional) beamforming techniques to
benefit from the richness of real channels. This work aims at presenting the
on-going 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
