FREQUENCY DIVISION DUPLEX:

It only shows the structure of one frame in time domain. It does not show any
structure in frequency domain.
Some of high level description you can get from this figure would be
i) Time duration for one frame (One radio frame, One system frame) is 10 ms. This means
that we have 100 radio frame per second.
ii) the number of samples in one frame (10 ms) is 307200 (307.200 K) samples. This means
that the number of samples per second is 307200 x 100 = 30.72 M samples.
iii) Number of subframe in one frame is 10.
iv) Number of slots in one subframe is 2. This means that we have 20 slots within one
frame.

So one slot is the smallest structure in time domain ? No, if you magnify this frame
structure one step further, you would get the following figure.
Now you see that one slot is made up of 7 small blocks called 'symbol'. (One symbol is a
certain time span of signal that carry one spot in the I/Q constellation.).
And you see even smaller structures within a symbol. At the beginning of symbol you see a
very small span called 'Cyclic Prefix' and the remaining part is the real symbol data.
There are two different type of Cyclic Prefix. One is normal Cyclic Prefix and the other is
'Extended Cyclic Prefix' which is longer than the Normal Cyclic Prefix. (Since the length of
one slot is fixed and cannot be changed, if we use 'Extended Cyclic Prefix', the number of
symbols that can be accomodated within a slot should be decreased. So we can have only 6
symbols if we use 'Extended Cyclic Prefix').

If you magnify a subframe to show the exact timing and samples, it can be illustrated as
below.

A couple of things to be noticed about the subframe structure illustrated above is

the first OFDM symbol within a slot is a little bit longer than the other OFDM symbols

Typical N_ifft for each system BW is as follows

the number of samples shown in this illustration is based on the assumption that the
sampling rate is 30.072 M samples/sec and 2048 bins/IFFT(N_ifft). Since real
sampling rate and N_ifft varies depending on system BW, you need to scale this
number according to a specific BW.

System BW

Number of RBs

N IFFT (bins/IFFT)

1.4

128

3.0

15

256

5.0

25

512

10.0

50

1024

15.0

75

2048

20.0

100

2048

Following shows the overal subframe structure from "LTE Resource Grid" (I realized that this
site is not available any more. Fortunately, recently another expert put great effort to create
another resource grid application and allowed me to share with everybody. Here
goes Sandesh Dhagle's Resource Grid)

Now let's magnify the structure even further, but this time expand in frequency domain, not
in time domain. You will get the following full detail diagram.

The first thing you have to be very familiar with as an engineer working on LTE is the
following channel map shown above.
We can represent an LTE signal in a two dimensional map as shown above. The horizontal
axis is time domain and the vertical axis is frequency domain. The minimum unit on vertical
axis is a sub carrier and the minimum unit on horizontal axis is symbol. For both time
domain and frequency domain, there are multiple hiarachies of the units, meaning a
multiple combination of a smaller unit become a larger units.
Let's look at the frequency domain structure first.
LTE (any OFDM/OFDMA) band is made up of multiple small spaced channels and we call
each of these small channels as "Sub Carrier".
Space between the chhanel and the next channel is always same regardless of the system
bandwidth of the LTE band.
So if the system bandwidth of LTE channel changes, number of the channels (sub carriers)
changes but the space between channels does not change.
Q> What
Q> What
carriers.
Q> What
carriers.
Q> What

is the space between a subcarrier and the next sub carrier ? A> 15 Khz
is the number of channels(sub carriers) for 20 Mhz LTE band ? A> 1200 sub
is the number of channels(sub carriers) for 10 Mhz LTE band ? A> 600 sub
is the number of channels(sub carriers) for 5 Mhz LTE band ? A> 300 sub carriers.

Got any feelings about sub carriers and it's relation to system bandwidth ?
Now let's look at the basic units of horizontal axis which is time domain. The minimum unit
of the time domain is a Symbol, which amounts to 66.7 us. Regardless of bandwidth, the
symbol length does not changes.In case of time domain, we have a couple of other

structures as well. The largest unit in time domain is a frame, each of which is 10 ms in
length. Each of the frame consists of 10 sub frames, each of which is 1 ms in length. Each of
sub frame consists of 2 slots, each of which is 0.5 ms in length.Each of slots consists of 7
symbols, each of which is 66.7 us.
With this in mind, let's think about the scale in reverse direction.
Q> How many symbols are there in a slot ? A> 7 symbols.
Q> How many symbols in a sub frame ? A> 14 symbols.
Q> How many slots are there in a frame ? A> 20 slots.
Now let's look at the units which is made up of both time domain (horizontal axis) and
frequency domain (vertical axis). Let's call this type of unit a two-dimensional unit.
The minimum two dimensional unit is resource element which is made up of one symbol in
time domain and one sub carrier in frequency domain. Another two dimensional unit is
resource block(RB) which is made up of one slot in time domain and 12 sub-carrier in
frequency domain. Resource Block(RB) is the most important units in LTE both for protocol
side and RF measurement side.
Now here goes questions.
Q> How many symbols in a resource block ? A> 7 symbols.
Q> How many sub-carriers in a resource block ? A> 12 sub-carriers.
Q> How many resource elements in a resource block ? A> 84 resource elements.
Now it's time to combine all the units we covered. The following questions are very
important to read any of the LTE specification.
Q> How many resource blocks in a 20 Mhz band ? A> 100 resource blocks.
Q> How many resource blocks in a 10 Mhz band ? A> 50 resource blocks.
Q> How many resource blocks in a 5 Mhz band ? A> 25 resource blocks.
I have seen this type of mapping so many times from so many different sources, but do I
really understand all the details of the map ? No not yet. It will take several years to
understand every aspects of the map.
Probably what I do as the first step is to describe each part of the map in a verbal form

Overview-TDD

PBCH(Physical Broadcast Channel)

o It carries only the MIB.

o
o

It is using QPSK.

Mapped to 6 Resource Blocks (72 subcarriers), centered around DC subcarrier

in sub frame 0.
o Mapped to Resource Elements which is not reserved for transmission of
reference signals, PDCCH or PCHICH
The first L(1 or 2 or 3) Symbols

This is one of the most confusing area of the map because multiple channels are located in
this area. On the first symbol is PCFICH but PCFICH takes only part of the resource blocks
on the first symbol not all. PHICH is carried by this area as well. And the remaining space
not occupied by PCFICH and PHICH is allocated for PDCCH.
PCFICH(Physical Control Format Indicator Channel)

It carries the number of symbols that can be used for control channels (PDCCH and
PHICH).

Mapped to the first OFDM symbol in each of the downlink sub-frameThis contains the
information on number of OFDM symbols for PDCCH and PHICH symbol duration
received from the PBCHUE decode this channel to figure out how many OFDM
symbols are assigned for PDCCH

It is 16 data subcarriers of the first OFDM symbol of the subframe.

PCFICH data is carried by 4 REGs and these four REGs are evenly distributed across
the whole band regardless of the bandwidth.
The exact position of PCFICH is determined by cell ID and bandwidth.