LTE Map and Allocation Calculators

If you are in the "advanced" LTE stage (not to be mixed up with LTE-Advanced) and care about resource blocks, subframes, physical channels, control format indicator, antenna ports, HARQ indicator channels, etc. etc. and how all of that comes together, I've found two interesting links to visualize all that:

The first link is to an LTE Resource Grid calculator. After setting a all input parameters such as the channel size (1.4 to 20 MHz), number of symbols used for the downlink control channel, etc. the resource grid is visualized with the different physical channels marked in different colors. Great stuff, finally an easy way to transform all those formulas in the spec to an easy to understand map and see how changing the input parameters change to channel map. Also, the map is a great way to understand how much of the channel is used for control information and thus overhead, and how much is used for actual user data.

The second link is an LTE Physical Downlink Shared Channel Allocation Calculator. Given the channel bandwidth, control format indicator, modulation type, the number of resource blocks assigned to a device and a couple of other input parameters and the calculator will come up with the number of bits that are transmitted per slot and subframe (1ms) to a device. Again, it's interesting to play around with the input parameters and see how the result changes in real time.

Have fun