Single Carrier FDMA: A New Air Interface for Long Term Evolution

Appendix C

Deciphering the 3GPP LTE Specifications

Unless you are really familiar with the LTE standardization process, it is rather difficult to understand how things actually work just by reading through the specifications. Since a technical specification is merely a description of a guideline for interoperability, it does not necessarily explain any rationale or background information for choice of the specific methodologies or parameters.

One way to find a more detailed description of the specific methodology or parameter in the specification is to go through the contribution papers (called technical documents, or tdocs) that 3GPP uploads on their meeting website. 3GPP has different work groups working on different aspects of the radio interface and network architecture. The Technical Specification Group Radio Access Networks (TSG RAN) is where all the radio air interface specifications are handled and it has five working groups (WG) as described in Table C.1.

Table C.2 highlights the LTE specifications and their corresponding working groups.

Most of the physical layer and MAC layer components are discussed in RAN1 meetings and the meeting information is at http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/Meetings-R1.htm. Figure C.1 is a screenshot of the website.

If you go to this site, there is a column called “First & Last tdoc” (tdoc = technical document) as shown in Figure C.1. This is the paper number that identifies each contribution paper. If you click on the link, it directs ...