4G LTE Advanced Tutorial

- overview, information, tutorial about the basics of LTE Advanced, the 4G

technology being called IMT Advanced being developed under 3GPP.
IN THIS SECTION
LTE Advanced Tutorial
Carrier Aggregation
Coordinated Multipoint - CoMP
LTE Relay
LTE D2D
LTE HetNet
See also
3G LTE
With the standards definitions now available for LTE, the Long Term Evolution of the 3G services,
eyes are now turning towards the next development, that of the truly 4G technology named IMT
Advanced. The new technology being developed under the auspices of 3GPP to meet these
requirements is often termed LTE Advanced.
In order that the cellular telecommunications technology is able to keep pace with technologies that
may compete, it is necessary to ensure that new cellular technologies are being formulated and
developed. This is the reasoning behind starting the development of the new LTE Advanced
systems, proving the technology and developing the LTE Advanced standards.
In order that the correct solution is adopted for the 4G system, the ITU-R (International
Telecommunications Union - Radiocommunications sector) has started its evaluation process to
develop the recommendations for the terrestrial components of the IMT Advanced radio interface.
One of the main competitors for this is the LTE Advanced solution.
One of the key milestones is October 2010 when the ITU-R decides the framework and key
characteristics for the IMT Advanced standard. Before this, the ITU-R will undertake the evaluation of
the various proposed radio interface technologies of which LTE Advanced is a major contender.

Key milestones for ITU-R IMT Advanced evaluation

The ITU-R has set a number of milestones to ensure that the evaluation of IMT Advanced
technologies occurs in a timely fashion. A summary of the main milestones is given below and this
defines many of the overall timescales for the development of IMT Advanced and in this case LTE
Advanced as one of the main technologies to be evaluated.
MILESTONE

DATE

Issue invitation to propose Radio Interface Technologies.

March 2008

ITU date for cut-off for submission of proposed Radio Interface

Technologies.

October
2009

Cutoff date for evaluation report to ITU.

June 2010

Decision on framework of key characteristics of IMT Advanced

Radio Interface Technologies.

October
2010

Completion of development of radio interface specification

recommendations.

February
2011

LTE Advanced development history

With 3G technology established, it was obvious that the rate of development of cellular technology
should not slow. As a result initial ideas for the development of a new 4G system started to be
investigated. In one early investigation which took place on 25 December 2006 with information
released to the press on 9 February 2007, NTT DoCoMo detailed information about trials in which
they were able to send data at speeds up to approximately 5 Gbit/s in the downlink within a 100MHz
bandwidth to a mobile station moving at 10km/h. The scheme used several technologies to achieve
this including variable spreading factor spread orthogonal frequency division multiplex, MIMO,
multiple input multiple output, and maximum likelihood detection. Details of these new 4G trials were
passed to 3GPP for their consideration
In 2008 3GPP held two workshops on IMT Advanced, where the "Requirements for Further
Advancements for E-UTRA" were gathered. The resulting Technical Report 36.913 was then
published in June 2008 and submitted to the ITU-R defining the LTE-Advanced system as their
proposal for IMT-Advanced.
The development of LTE Advanced / IMT Advanced can be seen to follow and evolution from the 3G
services that were developed using UMTS / W-CDMA technology.
WCDM
A
(UMTS)

HSPA
HSDPA /
HSUPA

HSPA+

LTE

LTE ADVANCED
(IMT ADVANCED)

Max downlink speed

bps

384 k

14 M

28 M

100M

1G

Max uplink speed

bps

128 k

5.7 M

11 M

50 M

500 M

WCDM
A
(UMTS)

HSPA
HSDPA /
HSUPA

HSPA+

LTE

LTE ADVANCED
(IMT ADVANCED)

Latency
round trip time
approx

150 ms

100 ms

50ms
(max)

~10 ms

less than 5 ms

3GPP releases

Rel 99/4

Rel 5 / 6

Rel 7

Rel 8

Rel 10

Approx years of initial roll

out

2003 / 4

2005 / 6
HSDPA
2007 / 8
HSUPA

2008 / 9

2009 / 10

Access methodology

CDMA

CDMA

CDMA

OFDMA / SCFDMA

OFDMA / SCFDMA

LTE Advanced is not the only candidate technology. WiMAX is also there, offering very high data
rates and high levels of mobility. However it now seems less likely that WiMAX will be adopted as the
4G technology, with LTE Advanced appearing to be better positioned.

LTE Advanced key features

With work starting on LTE Advanced, a number of key requirements and key features are coming to
light. Although not fixed yet in the specifications, there are many high level aims for the new LTE
Advanced specification. These will need to be verified and much work remains to be undertaken in
the specifications before these are all fixed. Currently some of the main headline aims for LTE
Advanced can be seen below:
1. Peak data rates: downlink - 1 Gbps; uplink - 500 Mbps.
2. Spectrum efficiency: 3 times greater than LTE.
3. Peak spectrum efficiency: downlink - 30 bps/Hz; uplink - 15 bps/Hz.
4. Spectrum use: the ability to support scalable bandwidth use and spectrum aggregation
where non-contiguous spectrum needs to be used.
5. Latency: from Idle to Connected in less than 50 ms and then shorter than 5 ms one way for
individual packet transmission.
6. Cell edge user throughput to be twice that of LTE.
7. Average user throughput to be 3 times that of LTE.
8. Mobility: Same as that in LTE

9. Compatibility: LTE Advanced shall be capable of interworking with LTE and 3GPP legacy
systems.
These are many of the development aims for LTE Advanced. Their actual figures and the actual
implementation of them will need to be worked out during the specification stage of the system.

LTE Advanced technologies

There are a number of key technologies that will enable LTE Advanced to achieve the high data
throughput rates that are required. MIMO and OFDM are two of the base technologies that will be
enablers. Along with these there are a number of other techniques and technologies that will be
employed.
OFDM forms the basis of the radio bearer. Along with it there is OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiple Access) along with SC-FDMA (Single Channel Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiple Access). These will be used in a hybrid format. However the basis for all of these access
schemes is OFDM.

Note on OFDM:
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) is a form of transmission that uses a large number of close spaced
carriers that are modulated with low rate data. Normally these signals would be expected to interfere with each other,
but by making the signals orthogonal to each other there is no mutual interference. The data to be transmitted is split
across all the carriers to give resilience against selective fading from multi-path effects..
Click on the link for an OFDM tutorial

One of the other key enablers for LTE Advanced that is common to LTE is MIMO. This scheme is
also used by many other technologies including WiMAX and Wi-Fi - 802.11n. MIMO - Multiple Input
Multiple Output enables the data rates achieved to be increased beyond what the basic radio bearer
would normally allow.

Note on MIMO:
Two major limitations in communications channels can be multipath interference, and the data throughput limitations
as a result of Shannon's Law. MIMO provides a way of utilising the multiple signal paths that exist between a

transmitter and receiver to significantly improve the data throughput available on a given channel with its defined
bandwidth. By using multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver along with some complex digital signal
processing, MIMO technology enables the system to set up multiple data streams on the same channel, thereby
increasing the data capacity of a channel.
Click on the link for a MIMO tutorial

For LTE Advanced, the use of MIMO is likely to involve further and more advanced techniques with
additional antennas in the matrix to enable additional paths to be sued, although as the number of
antennas increases, the overhead increases and the return per additional path is less.
In additional to the numbers of antennas increasing, it is likely that techniques such as beamforming
may be used to enable the antenna coverage to be focused where it is needed.
With data rates rising well above what was previously available, it will be necessary to ensure that
the core network is updated to meet the increasing requirements. It is therefore necessary to further
improve the system architecture.
These and other technologies will be used with LTE Advanced to provide the very high data rates
that are being sought along with the other performance characteristics that are needed. . . . . . . . . . .
By Ian Poole