LTE

LTE was designed by a collaboration of national and regional telecommunications standards bodies known as the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and is known in full as 3GPP Long Term Evolution. LTE evolved from an earlier 3GPP system known as the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), which in turn evolved from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM).

ARCHITECTURE:
In the new architecture, the evolved packet core (EPC) is a direct replacement for the packet switched domain of UMTS and GSM. It distributes all types of information to the user, voice as well as data, using the packet switching technologies that have traditionally been used for data alone. There is no equivalent to the circuit switched domain: instead, voice calls are transported using voice over IP. The evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) handles the EPCs radio communications with the mobile, so is a direct replacement for the UTRAN. The new architecture was designed as part of two 3GPP work items, namely system architecture evolution (SAE), which covered the core network, and long term evolution (LTE), which covered the radio access network, air interface and mobile. Officially, the whole system is known as the evolved packet system (EPS), while the acronym LTE refers only to the evolution of the air interface.

User Equipment
The actual communication device is known as the mobile equipment (ME). The equipment can also be divided into two components, namely the mobile termination (MT), which handles all the communication functions, and the terminal equipment (TE), which terminates the data streams. The universal integrated circuit card (UICC) is a smart card, colloquially known as the SIM card. It runs an application known as the universal subscriber identity module (USIM) , which stores user-specific data such as the users phone number and home network identity. The USIM also carries out various security-related calculations, using secure keys that the smart card stores. Mobiles can have a wide variety of radio capabilities, which cover issues such as the maximum data rate that they can handle, the different types of radio access technology that they support and the carrier frequencies on which they can transmit and receive. Mobiles pass these capabilities to the radio access network by means of signalling messages, so that the E-UTRAN knows how to control them correctly.

Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network

The E-UTRAN handles the radio communications between the mobile and the evolved packet core and just has one component, the evolved Node B (eNB). Each eNB is a base station that controls the mobiles in one or more cells. A mobile communicates with just one base station and one cell at a time, so there is no equivalent of the soft handover state from UMTS. The base station that is communicating with a mobile is known as its serving eNB. The eNB has two main functions. Firstly, the eNB sends radio transmissions to all its mobiles on the downlink and receives transmissions from them on the uplink, using the analogue and digital signal processing functions of the LTE air interface. Secondly, the eNB controls the low-level operation of all its mobiles, by sending them signaling messages such as handover commands that relate to those radio transmissions. Each base station is connected to the EPC by means of the S1 interface. It can also be connected to nearby base stations by the X2 interface, which is mainly used for signaling and packet forwarding during handover.

Evolved Packet Core

The packet data network (PDN) gateway (P-GW) is the EPCs point of contact with the outside world. Through the SGi interface, each PDN gateway exchanges data with one or more external devices

The serving gateway (S-GW) acts as a router, and forwards data between the base station and the PDN gateway. A typical network might contain a handful of serving gateways, each of which looks after the mobiles in a certain geographical

region. Each mobile is assigned to a single serving gateway, but the serving gateway can be changed if the mobile moves sufficiently far. The mobility management entity (MME) controls the high-level operation of the mobile, by sending it signalling messages about issues such as security and the management of data streams that are unrelated to radio communications. Each mobile is assigned to a single MME, which is known as its serving MME, but that can be changed if the mobile moves sufficiently far. The S1-U interface carries traffic for the serving gateway, while the S1-MME interface carries signalling messages for the MME. Cell broadcast centre (CBC) was previously used by UMTS for the rarely implemented cell broadcast service (CBS). In LTE, the equipment is re-used for a service known as the earthquake and tsunami warning system (ETWS) [13]. Secondly, the equipment identity register (EIR) was also inherited from UMTS, and lists the details of lost or stolen mobiles.

FEATURES OF LTE: LTE was required to deliver a peak data rate of 100 Mbps in the downlink and 50 Mbps in the uplink. Spectral efficiency, which expresses the typical capacity of one cell per unit bandwidth. LTE was required to support a spectral efficiency three to four times greater than WCDMA in the downlink and two to three times greater in the uplink. Latency is another important issue, particularly for time-critical applications such as voice and interactive games. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, the requirements state that the time taken for data to travel between the mobile phone and the fixed network should be less than five milliseconds, provided that the air interface is uncongested. Coverage: LTE is optimized for cell sizes up to 5 km, works with degraded performance up to 30 km and supports cell sizes of up to 100 km. Mobility: It is also optimized for mobile speeds up to 15 km hr1, works with high performance up to 120 km hr1 and supports speeds of up to 350 km hr1. Bandwidth: LTE is designed to work with a variety of different bandwidths, which range from 1.4MHz up to a maximum of 20 MHz.

OFDMA
The technique used for radio transmission and reception in LTE is known as orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). OFDMA carries out the same functions as any other multiple access technique, by allowing the base station to communicate with several different mobiles at the same time. However, it is also a powerful way to minimize the problems of fading and inter-symbol interference.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

Example, the delay spread was 1 s and the data rate was 400 ksps, so the symbols overlapped at the receiver by 40%. That led to interference and bit errors at the receiver. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a powerful way to solve the problem. Instead of sending the information as a single stream, an OFDM transmitter divides the information into several parallel sub-streams, and sends each sub-stream on a different frequency known as a sub-carrier. If the total data rate stays the same, then the data rate on each sub-carrier is less than before, so the symbol duration is longer. This reduces the amount of ISI, and reduces the error rate.

Here, we have divided the original data stream amongst four sub-carriers with frequencies f1 to f4. The data rate on each sub-carrier is now 100 ksps, so the symbol duration has increased to 10 s. If the delay spread remains at 1 s, then the symbols only overlap by 10%. This reduces the amount of ISI to one quarter of what it was before and reduces the number of errors in the receiver. In OFDMA, the base station shares its resources by transmitting to the mobiles at different times and frequencies, so as to meet the requirements of the individual applications. For example, mobile 1 is receiving a voice over IP stream, so the data rate, and henceN the number of sub-carriers, is low but constant. On the other hand, mobile 2 is receiving a stream of non real time packet data. The average data rate is higher, but the data come in bursts, so the number of sub-carriers can vary. The base station can also respond to frequency dependent fading, by allocating subcarriers on which the mobile is receiving a strong signal. In the figure, mobile 3 is receiving a VoIP stream, but it is also affected by frequency dependent fading. In response, the base

station allocates sub-carriers on which the mobile is receiving a strong signal, and changes this allocation as the fading pattern changes. In a similar way, it can transmit to mobile 4 using two separate blocks of sub-carriers, which are separated by a fade. By allocating sub-carriers in response to changes in the fading patterns, an OFDMA transmitter can greatly reduce the impact of time- and frequencydependent fading.

Block diagram
The base station is sending streams of bits to three different mobiles. It modulates each bit stream independently, possibly using a different modulation scheme for each one. It then passes each symbol stream through a serial-to-parallel converter, to divide it into sub-streams. The number of sub-streams per mobile depends on the data rate: for example, a voice application might only use a few sub-streams, while a video application might use many more The resource element mapper takes the individual sub-streams and chooses the subcarriers on which to transmit them. The resulting information is the amplitude and phase of each sub-carrier as a function of frequency. By passing it through an inverse FFT, we can compute the in-phase and quadrature components of the corresponding time-domain waveform. This can then be digitized, filtered and mixed up to radio frequency for transmission. Cyclic prefix (CP) insertion the transmitter starts by inserting a guard period before each symbol then copies data from the end of the symbol following, so as to fill up the guard period. If the cyclic prefix is longer than the delay spread, then the receiver can still be confident of reading information from just one symbol at a time. LTE uses a cyclic prefix of about 4.7 s. The mobile reverses the process. It starts by sampling the incoming signal, filtering it, and converting it down to baseband. It then passes the data through a forward FFT, to recover the amplitude and phase of each sub-carrier.

Channel estimation: each sub-carrier can reach the receiver with a completely arbitrary amplitude and phase. To deal with this, the OFDMA transmitter injects reference symbols into the transmitted data stream. The receiver measures the incoming reference symbols, compares them with the ones transmitted, and uses the result to remove the amplitude changes and phase shifts from the incoming signal.

MIMO/ spatial multiplexing

IN MIMO the transmitter and receiver both have multiple antennas, then we can set up multiple parallel data streams between them, so as to increase the data rate.

FIG shows a basic MIMO system, in which the transmitter and receiver both have two antennas. In the transmitter, the antenna mapper takes symbols from the modulator two at a time, and sends one symbol to each antenna. The antennas transmit the two symbols simultaneously, so as to double the transmitted data rate. The symbols travel to the receive antennas by way of four separate radio paths, so the received signals can be written as follows: y1 = H11x1 + H12 x2 + n1 y2 = H21x1 + H22 x2 + n2 Here, x1 and x2 are the signals sent from the two transmit antennas, y1 and y2 are the signals that arrive at the two receive antennas, and n1 and n2 represent the received noise and interference. Hij expresses the way in which the transmitted symbols are attenuated and phase-shifted, as they travel to receive antenna i from transmit antenna j. The receivers first task is to estimate the four channel elements Hij. To help it do this, the transmitter broadcasts reference symbols. When one antenna transmits a reference symbol, the other antenna keeps quiet and sends nothing at all. The receiver can then estimate the channel elements H11 and H21, by measuring the two received signals at the times when transmit antenna 1 is sending a reference

symbol. It can then wait until transmit antenna 2 sends a reference symbol, before estimating the channel elements H12 and H22. The receiver now has enough information to estimate the transmitted symbols x1 and x2. There are several ways for it to do this, but the simplest is a zero-forcing detector, which operates as follows. If we ignore the noise and interference, then Equation becomes

Here, Hij is the receivers estimate of the channel element Hij . Multiple User MIMO The mobile antennas are on two different mobiles instead of one. This technique is known as multiple user MIMO (MU-MIMO)

Here, the mobiles transmit at the same time and on the same carrier frequency, but without using any precoding. The base station receives their transmissions and

separates them using (for example) the minimum mean square error detector. This technique only works if the channel matrix is well behaved, but we can usually guarantee this for two reasons. Firstly, the mobiles are likely to be far apart, so their ray paths are likely to be very different. Secondly, the base station can freely choose the mobiles that are taking part, so it can freely choose mobiles that lead to a well-behaved channel matrix.

WiMAX is:

Acronym for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. Based on Wireless MAN technology. A wireless technology optimized for the delivery of IP centric services over a wide area.

The network reference model developed by the WiMAX Forum NWG defines a number of functional entities and interfaces between those entities. Fig below shows some of the more important functional entities.

Base station (BS): The BS is responsible for providing the air interface to the MS. Additional functions that may be part of the BS are micromobility management functions, such as handoff triggering and tunnel establishment, radio resource management, QoS policy enforcement, traffic classification, DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) proxy, key management, session management, and multicast group management. Access service network gateway (ASN-GW): The ASN gateway typically acts as a layer 2 traffic aggregation point within an ASN. Additional functions that may be part of the ASN gateway include intra-ASN location management and paging, radio resource management, and admission control, caching of subscriber profiles, and encryption keys, AAA client functionality, establishment, and management of mobility tunnel with base stations, QoS and policy enforcement, foreign agent functionality for mobile IP, and routing to the selected CSN. Connectivity service network (CSN): The CSN provides connectivity to the Internet, ASP, other public networks, and corporate networks. The CSN is owned by the NSP and includes AAA servers that support authentication for the devices, users, and specific services. The CSN also provides per user policy management of QoS and security. The CSN is also responsible for IP address management, support for roaming between different NSPs, location management between ASNs, and mobility and roaming between ASNs.