Wednesday 6 January 2010

3.9G (LTE) to 4G

Yesterday I blogged about the LTE-Advanced workshop. There are loads of documents that a lot of you will probably find it useful. You can also check the latest whitepapers and presentations on the 3g4g website here.

Last month Nomor published a whitepaper titled 'The way of LTE towards 4G'. The paper is good summary of the progress in standardisation. The following is summary from that paper with regards to LTE-A standardisation:

3GPP already agreed on the schedule for Release 10 where LTE Advanced will be standardized with:
• functional freeze in December 2010
• ASN.1 freeze in March/June 2011

In practice this means that the Physical Layer specification will have to be completed around September 2010, which leaves just about 9 months time. The protocol, interface and test
specification are to be completed by December 2010.

According to the major LTE-A functional enhancements, the following work items have been approved for Release 10:
• Carrier aggregation for LTE
• Enhanced downlink multiple antenna transmission for LTE
• Uplink multiple antenna transmission for LTE
• Latency reductions for LTE

A presentation introducing LTE-A technologies has been published early this year in [4].

The work on Cooperative Multipoint Transmission (CoMP) is still part of the downlink multiple
antenna work item. It is stated that the standardization impact of downlink CoMP will be assessed and a decision will be done in March 2010 if downlink CoMP will be standardized as part of this work item.

LTE Advanced will be fully built on the existing LTE specification Release 10 and not be defined as a new specification series. Stage 2 (architecture and functional description) will for instance be added to TS 36.300 in Release 10.

Please keep in mind that there are a large number of other work items within Release 10. Remarkably 3GPP also approved a Work Item on LTE Advanced Relays to improve coverage and improve cell edge throughput. The Work Item was supported by key operators.

You can read the complete paper here.

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