The ambitious data rate target of the Long Term Evolution - Advanced (LTE-A) systems, which are currently being standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), can only be achieved by using advanced Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna techniques on both uplink and downlink. In this paper, the focus is on LTE-A uplink and we discuss the suitability of two options for the closed loop precoded MIMO transmission. The first option is to use the same codebook of precoding matrices defined for LTE downlink, while the second option exploits the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix, which could theoretically achieve the MIMO capacity. Qualitative benefits of both solutions are discussed. Link level simulation results show that, the SVD-based approach only lead to a poor performance gain in terms of spectral efficiency over the LTE downlink codebook because of the losses due to the quantization of the right singular vectors of the channel matrix. Since SVD-based solution does not even exploit some useful properties (e. g., power balance over the antennas) which LTE Release 8 codebook offers, the latter results to be a more suitable candidate for the closed loop MIMO transmission in LTE-A uplink.
