IEEE Communications Magazine • February 2011
84
0163-6804/11/$25.00 © 2011 IEEE
INTRODUCTION
Deployment of fourth-generation (4G) mobile-
broadband systems based on the highly flexible
Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio access tech-
nology [1, 2] defined by the Third Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP) is currently ongoing
on a broad scale, with the first systems already
being in full commercial operation. These sys-
tems are based on the first release of LTE, 3GPP
Release 8, which was finalized in 2008. Release
8 can provide downlink and uplink peak rates up
to 300 and 75 Mb/s, respectively, a one-way
radio-network delay of less than 5 ms, and a sig-
nificant increase in spectrum efficiency. LTE
provides extensive support for spectrum flexibili-
ty, supports both frequency-division duplex
(FDD) and time-division duplex (TDD), and tar-
gets a smooth evolution from earlier 3GPP tech-
nologies such as time-division synchronous
code-division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) and
wideband CDMA (WCDMA)/high-speed pakcet
access (HSPA) as well as 3GPP2 technologies
such as cdma2000.
The LTE radio access technology is continu-
ously evolving to meet future requirements. In
Release 9, finalized at the end of 2009, support
for broadcast/multicast services, positioning ser-
vices, and enhanced emergency-call functionali-
ty, as well as enhancements for downlink
dual-layer beam-forming, were added.
Recently, 3GPP has concluded the work on
LTE Release 10, finalized at the end of 2010
and further extending the performance and
capabilities of LTE beyond Release 8/9. An
important aim of LTE Release 10 is to ensure
that LTE fulfills all the requirements for Inter-
national Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-
Advanced as defined by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) [3, 4]. The
relation to IMT-Advanced is also the reason for
the label LTE-Advanced sometimes given to
LTE Release 10 and beyond.
This article provides a brief overview of LTE
Release 8/9 and a short introduction to the IMT-
Advanced work. Following this background, the
extensions introduced in Release 10 are
described. The article is concluded with results
from system-level evaluations showing that LTE
Release 10 can fulfill and even surpass the IMT-
Advanced requirements.
OVERVIEW OF LTE RELEASE 8
LTE is an orthogonal frequency-division multi-
plexing (OFDM)-based radio access technology,
with conventional OFDM on the downlink and
discrete Fourier transform spread OFDM
(DFTS-OFDM) [1] on the uplink. DFTS-OFDM
allows for more efficient power-amplifier opera-
tion, thus providing the opportunity for reduced
terminal power consumption. At the same time,
equalization of the received signal is straightfor-
ward with conventional OFDM. The use of
OFDM on the downlink combined with DFTS-
OFDM on the uplink thus minimizes terminal
complexity on the receiver side (downlink) as
well as on the transmitter side (uplink), leading
to an overall reduction in terminal complexity
and power consumption.
The transmitted signal is organized into sub-
frames of 1 ms duration with 10 subframes form-
ing a radio frame as illustrated in Fig. 1. Each
downlink subframe consists of a control region
of one to three OFDM symbols, used for control
signaling from the base station to the terminals,
and a data region comprising the remaining part
and used for data transmission to the terminals.
The data transmissions in each subframe are
dynamically scheduled by the base station. As
seen in Fig. 1, cell-specific reference signals are
also transmitted in each downlink subframe.
These reference signals are used for data demod-
ulation at the terminal (or user equipment, UE),
and for measurement purposes (e.g., for channel
status reports sent from the terminals to the
base station).
Spectrum flexibility is one of the key proper-
ties of the LTE radio access technology. A wide
range of different bandwidths is defined and
ABSTRACT
This article provides a high-level overview of
LTE Release 10, sometimes referred to as LTE-
Advanced. First, a brief overview of the first
release of LTE and some of its technology com-
ponents is given, followed by a discussion on the
IMT-Advanced requirements. The technology
enhancements introduced to LTE in Release 10,
carrier aggregation, improved multi-antenna
support, relaying, and improved support for het-
erogeneous deployments, are described. The
article is concluded with simulation results,
showing that LTE Release 10 fulfills and even
surpasses the requirements for IMT-Advanced.
IMT-ADVANCED AND NEXT-GENERATION
MOBILE NETWORKS
Stefan Parkvall, Anders Furuskär, and Erik Dahlman, Ericsson Research
Evolution of LTE toward IMT-Advanced
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