LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

2.6 LTE-Advanced Specifications

Following the 3GPP Release principle, the LTE-Advanced technology components were added in Release 10 version of the existing LTE specifications, which already contained the Release 8 and 9 LTE features. In some areas new specifications were created, such as for the physical layer of the relay backhaul operation [7] as shown in Figure 2.3, while for example the physical layer impacts of carrier aggregation or multiple antenna enhancements were captured in the existing 36.2xx specification series. The carrier aggregation band combinations are Release independent, with each band combination done as a separate work item, as shown in [8] as an example. The carrier aggregation band combinations can be implemented on top of Release 10 if there is no need for any of the Release 11 specific features. If some of the Release 11 features would be needed by the deployment scenario, such as multiple uplink timing advance values, then the band combination should be based on Release 11 version of the LTE-Advanced specification. With the same principle a new frequency band can be added in 3GPP specifications in a Release independent way so that if a new band is finalized during Release 11 or 12 timeframe one does not need to wait for the ongoing Release to be completed and terminals to be available, but one can implement still for example Release 8 based terminal to the new frequency band (or Release 10 based if LTE-Advanced features are desired) as long as fulfilling ...