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ruary 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 10
0MHz bandwidth to a mobile station moving at 10km/h. The scheme used several tec
hnologies 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 the
ir consideration
In 2008 3GPP held two workshops on IMT Advanced, where the "Requirements for Fur
ther Advancements for E-UTRA" were gathered. The resulting Technical Report 36.9
13 was then published in June 2008 and submitted to the ITU-R defining the LTE-A
dvanced system as their proposal for IMT-Advanced.
The development of LTE Advanced / IMT Advanced can be seen to follow and evoluti
on from the 3G services that were developed using UMTS / W-CDMA technology.
WCDMA
(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
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 2014 / 15
Access methodology CDMA CDMA CDMA OFDMA / SC-FDMA OFDMA / SC-FDMA
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 lik
ely 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 feature
s are coming to light. Although not fixed yet in the specifications, there are m
any high level aims for the new LTE Advanced specification. These will need to b
Note on OFDM:
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) is a form of transmission that us
es 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 agai
nst selective fading from multi-path effects..
Click on the link for an OFDM tutorial
Multiple Input Multiple Output, MIMO: One of the other key enablers for LTE Adv
anced that is common to LTE is MIMO. This scheme is also used by many other tech
nologies including WiMAX and Wi-Fi - 802.11n. MIMO - Multiple Input Multiple Out
put 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 an