11.1 Introduction

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defined requirements for the new International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-Advanced systems. The target was that the new systems can provide substantially higher performance than those IMT-2000 systems 10 years earlier. The targets were defined for the peak and average data rates and for the spectral efficiency in multiple environments, for latency, for mobility and for spectrum flexibility. Additionally, 3GPP defined its own targets for LTE-Advanced. 3GPP targets were set higher than those defined by ITU. This chapter presents the target setting and the results of the performance evaluation.

LTE-Advanced enhances system performance compared to LTE Release 8 in multiple operating domains: in spatial domain, in time domain and in frequency domain. The main enhancements are listed in Figure 11.1. The spatial domain refers to new capabilities to take benefit of multi-antenna solutions for increasing the data rates and for increasing the spectral efficiency with beamforming. The multi-antenna techniques are enhanced also to multi-cell cases with Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmission and reception. LTE-Advanced allows utilizing heterogeneous networks including small cells and relay nodes. The frequency domain is enhanced by carrier aggregation up to 100 MHz bandwidth and by uplink multi-cluster scheduling. Those new features can improve LTE-Advanced performance compared to Release 8.

Figure 11.1 Summary of LTE-Advanced ...

Get LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.