LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

12.2 Release 11 LTE-Advanced Content

3GPP is complementing the first LTE-Advanced version, Release 10, with large number of new study and work items in Release 11. Perhaps the biggest topic currently on-going is the CoMP which was a part of the original LTE-Advanced studies but was eventually postponed to Release 11 to ensure finalization of the items covered in the previous chapters. The CoMP principles and performance are covered in detail in Chapter 13. The key 3GPP work items for Release 11 are shown in Figure 12.1, with the focus on the topics aiming to improve performance metrics such as network capacity. Respectively, the key study items are shown in Figure 12.2. There are likely to be further study items introduced during the Release 11 work but those will most likely end up finalizing the studies so that the actual features included in the specifications are only in later Releases. The full 3GPP TSG RAN Release 11 work program contains more topics than shown in Figure 12.1, but some of them present a continuation of LTE Release 8 and 9 topics, and thus are not considered to be LTE-Advanced related features. The topic which received most interest in 3GPP in Release 11 prioritization activity from 3GPP network operators was the enhanced performance requirements for LTE UE, improving the system performance with advanced receivers as discussed in Section 12.3. From the listed topics the low cost MTC UE is not aiming to directly to increase capacity or data rates, but to facilitate ...