LTE Advanced

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LTE Advanced is currently being standardized by 3GPP as major enhancement of 3GPP Long Term Evolution. LTE standardization has come to a mature state by now where changes on the specification are limited to corrections and bug fixes. LTE mobile communication systems are expected to be deployed from 2010 onwards as natural evolution of GSM and UMTS. 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 1Gbps. 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 standardisation organisations 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) [ [http://www.3gpp.org/news/2008_04_LTE_A.htm Beyond 3G: “LTE-Advanced” Workshop, Shenzhen, China ] ] A first set of 3GPP requiremens on LTE Advanced has been approved in June 2008 [ [http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/36913.htm 3GPP specification: Requirements for further advancements for E-UTRA (LTE-Advanced) ] ] . Besides the peak data rate 1Gbit/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 studies within the working groups.

The proposals could roughly be categorized into [ [http://www.nomor.de/home/technology/white-papers/progress-on-lte-advanced---the-future-4g-standard Nomor Research: White Paper on LTE Advance ] ] :
* 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

Stardardisation 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 trail where they achieved a maximum packet transmission rate of approximately 5Gbps in the downlink using 100MHz frequency bandwidth to a mobile station moving at 10km/h [ [http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/2007/001319.html NTT DoCoMo Achieves World's First 5Gbps Packet Transmission in 4G Field Experiment ] ]

References

External links for more information

* [http://www.nomor.de/home/technology/white-papers/progress-on-lte-advanced---the-future-4g-standard Nomor Research: White Paper on LTE Advance]