LTE Advanced

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LTE Advanced is a mobile communication standard. It is currently being standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a major enhancement of 3GPP Long Term Evolution. LTE (Long Term Evolution) standardization has come to a mature state by now where changes in the specification are limited to corrections and bug fixes. LTE mobile communication systems are expected to be deployed from 2010 onwards as a natural evolution of Global system for mobile communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS).

Overview

Being defined as 3G technology LTE does not meet the requirements for 4G also called IMT Advanced as defined by the International Telecommunication Union such as peak data rates up to 1 Gbit/s. The ITU has invited the submission of candidate Radio Interface Technologies (RITs) following their requirements as mentioned in a circular letter.

The mobile communication industry and standardization organizations have therefore started to work on 4G access technologies such as LTE Advanced. At a workshop in April 2008 in China 3GPP agreed the plans for future work on Long Term Evolution (LTE)^[1] A first set of 3GPP requirements on LTE Advanced has been approved in June 2008^[2]. Besides the peak data rate 1 Gbit/s that fully supports the 4G requirements as defined by the ITU-R, it also targets faster switching between power states and improved performance at the cell edge. Detailed proposals are being studied within the working groups.

Proposals

The proposals could roughly be categorized into^[3]:

• Various concepts for Relay Nodes
• UE Dual TX antenna solutions for SU-MIMO and diversity MIMO
• Scalable system bandwidth exceeding 20 MHz, Potentially up to 100MHz
• Local area optimization of air interface
• Nomadic / Local Area network and mobility solutions
• Flexible Spectrum Usage
• Cognitive Radio
• Automatic and autonomous network configuration and operation
• Enhanced precoding and forward error correction
• Interference management and suppression
• Asymmetric bandwidth assignment for FDD
• Hybrid OFDMA and SC-FDMA in uplink
• UL/DL inter eNB coordinated MIMO

Timeframe

Standardization is expected to be included in 3GPP Release 10 timeframe. The importance and timeframe of LTE Advanced will of course largely depend on the success of LTE itself. If possible LTE-Advanced will be a software upgrade for LTE networks.

Technology Demonstrations

• In February 2007 NTT DoCoMo announced the completion of a 4G trial where they achieved a maximum packet transmission rate of approximately 5 Gbit/s in the downlink using 100MHz frequency bandwidth to a mobile station moving at 10 km/h^[4]

References

1. ^ Beyond 3G: “LTE-Advanced” Workshop, Shenzhen, China
2. ^ 3GPP specification: Requirements for further advancements for E-UTRA (LTE-Advanced)
3. ^ Nomor Research: White Paper on LTE Advance
4. ^ NTT DoCoMo Achieves World's First 5 Gbit/s Packet Transmission in 4G Field Experiment

• LTE-Advanced - Evolving LTE towards IMT-Advanced Parkvall, Dahlman et al.; Ericsson; Vehicular Technology Conference, 2008. VTC 2008-Fall. IEEE 68th 21-24 Sept. 2008 Page(s):1 - 5

External links

• Nomor Research: White Paper on LTE Advance
• 3GPP: Official 3GPP Standardisation Page on LTE Advanced
• Nomor Research at the LTE World Summit: "Initial throught on LTE Advanced for 3GPP Release 10"