LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

3.1 Introduction

This chapter presents the overview of Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 8 and 9. The principles of the first two LTE Releases produced by 3GPP before LTE-Advanced in Release 10 are presented. In many areas of the LTE-Advanced Release 10, the design is based on the Release 8 and 9 principles with only slight modifications or enhancements to improve the performance. Especially the architecture and protocol solutions in many cases are actually unchanged with LTE-Advanced, perhaps only adding necessary elements to activate the introduced LTE-Advanced physical layer features. This chapter first introduces the LTE physical layer principles and then continues to cover the architecture and protocols solutions in Release 8 and 9. This chapter continues further to cover the overview of the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and IP Multimedia System (IMS). This chapter is concluded with the UE capability and introduction of the differences between Release 8 and Release 9.