Understanding LTE with MATLAB

Chapter 1

Introduction

We live in the era of a mobile data revolution. With the mass-market expansion of smartphones, tablets, notebooks, and laptop computers, users demand services and applications from mobile communication systems that go far beyond mere voice and telephony. The growth in data-intensive mobile services and applications such as Web browsing, social networking, and music and video streaming has become a driving force for development of the next generation of wireless standards. As a result, new standards are being developed to provide the data rates and network capacity necessary to support worldwide delivery of these types of rich multimedia application.

LTE (Long Term Evolution) and LTE-Advanced have been developed to respond to the requirements of this era and to realize the goal of achieving global broadband mobile communications. The goals and objectives of this evolved system include higher radio access data rates, improved system capacity and coverage, flexible bandwidth operations, significantly improved spectral efficiency, low latency, reduced operating costs, multi-antenna support, and seamless integration with the Internet and existing mobile communication systems.

In some ways, LTE and LTE-Advanced are representatives of what is known as a fourth-generation wireless system and can be considered an organic evolution of the third-generation predecessors. On the other hand, in terms of their underlying transmission technology they represent a disruptive ...