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Erik Dahlman, Anders Furuskär, Ylva Jading, Magnus Lindström and Stefan Parkvall
This article presents some of the key features of the radio interface for LTE tion. Consequently, the LTE uplink employs
(long-term evolution), recently approved by 3GPP. LTE enables unprec- single-carrier transmission in the form of
edented performance in terms of peak data rates, delay, and spectrum DFT-spread OFDM (also called single-
efficiency. carrier FDMA). This solution has a smaller
peak-to-average-power ratio than regular
The authors discuss spectrum flexibility, multi-antenna technologies,
OFDM, resulting in more power-efficient
scheduling, link adaptation, power control, and retransmission handling. and less complex terminals.
The basic radio resource for OFDM
transmission can be described as a two-
Background ciples of LTE radio access is to exploit rather dimensional time-frequency grid that corre-
than suppress rapid variations in channel sponds to a set of OFDM symbols and sub-
Mobile broadband based on high-speed quality in order to make more efficient use carriers in the time and frequency domains.
packet access (HSPA) technology is already of available radio resources. This is done in In LTE, the basic unit for data transmission
a great success. But even so, to meet future both the time and frequency domains using is a pair of resource blocks that correspond
demands for mobile broadband services, the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing- to a 180kHz bandwidth during a 1ms sub-
industry must further improve service deliv- based (OFDM) radio access. frame (Figure 1). Therefore, by aggregating
ery, for example, through higher data rates, Conventional OFDM with data transmit- frequency resources and by adjusting trans-
shorter delays, and even greater capacity. ted over several parallel narrowband subcar- mission parameters, such as modulation or-
These are the very targets of 3GPP radio- riers lies at the core of LTE downlink radio der and channel code rate, one can flexibly
access networks, specifically through HSPA transmission. The use of relatively narrow- support a wide range of data rates.
Evolution and LTE.1-2 band subcarriers in combination with a cy-
Ericsson is committed to the development clic prefix makes OFDM transmission inher-
of HSPA and LTE as can be seen through an ently robust to time dispersion on the radio
Key features
active driving role in standardization and channel, effectively eliminating the need Several key features are needed to achieve
open prototyping. Examples of improved for complex receiver-side channel equaliza- the aggressive performance targets that have
performance compared with early 3G systems tion. In the downlink this is a particularly been set for LTE. In the text that follows
include peak data rates in excess of 300Mbps, attractive property because it simplifies re- we complement the basic description of sev-
delay and latencies of less than 10ms, and ceiver baseband processing and thus reduces eral individual key features with the specific
manifold gains in spectrum efficiency. LTE terminal cost and power consumption. This targets they address (for example, coverage,
can be deployed both in new and existing is especially important given the wide trans- capacity, data rate, delay) – where possible,
frequency bands and it facilitates simple op- mission bandwidths of LTE and – even more using the example depicted in Figure 1.
eration and maintenance.1 In addition, LTE so – when used in combination with multi-
both targets smooth evolution from legacy stream transmission. Spectrum flexibility
3GPP and 3GPP2 systems and constitutes In the uplink (where there is significantly Depending on regulatory aspects in differ-
a major step toward IMT-Advanced (Inter- less available transmission power compared ent geographical areas, radio spectrum for
national Mobile Telecommunication – Ad- to the downlink) one of the most import mobile communication is available in differ-
vanced, sometimes referred to as 4G). In fact, ant factors is a power-efficient transmission ent frequency bands in different bandwidths,
LTE includes many of the features originally scheme, in order to maximize coverage and and comes as both paired and unpaired spec-
considered for a future 4G system. lower terminal cost and power consump- trum. Spectrum flexibility, which enables
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Figure 1
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operation under all these conditions, is one of uses is the same for different bandwidths and voice over IP (VoIP), where relatively low
the key features of LTE radio access. similar for FDD and TDD. user data rates do not justify the additional
Besides being able to operate in differ- overhead associated with channel-dependent
ent frequency bands, LTE can be deployed Multi-antenna transmission scheduling. In summary, transmit diversity
with different bandwidths ranging from ap- The use of multi-antenna transmission tech- techniques increase system capacity and cell
proximately 1.25MHz (suitable for the initial niques in mobile-communication systems range.
migration of, for example, cdma2000/1xEV- enhances system performance, service capa- Multistream transmission employs multiple
DO systems) up to approximately 20MHz. bilities, or both. At its highest level, LTE antennas at the transmitter (network) and re-
Furthermore, LTE can operate in both paired multi-antenna transmission can be divided ceiver (terminal) side to provide simultaneous
and unpaired spectrum by providing a sin- into transmission of multiple parallel data streams
gle radio-access technology that supports • transmit diversity; and over a single radio link. This technique signif-
frequency-division duplex (FDD) as well as • (pre-coder-based) multistream transmission icantly increases the peak data rates over the
time-division duplex (TDD) operation. including beamforming as a special case. radio link – for example, given four base sta-
Where terminals are concerned, FDD can In Figure 1, the example fading patterns for tion transmit antennas and four correspond-
be operated in full- and half-duplex modes. two users can equivalently represent the sig- ing receive antennas at the terminal side, one
Half-duplex FDD, in which the terminal nals received by a single user from two differ- can deliver up to four parallel data streams
separates transmission and reception in fre- ent transmit antennas. In this context, trans- over the same radio link, effectively increas-
quency and time (Figure 2), is useful because mit diversity can be seen as a technique for ing the data rate by a factor of four.
it allows terminals to operate with relaxed averaging the signals received from the two In lightly loaded or small cell deploy-
duplex-filter requirements. This, in turn, antennas, thereby avoiding the deep fading ments, multistream transmission yields
reduces the cost of terminals and makes it dips that occur per antenna. very high data rates and makes more ef-
possible to exploit FDD frequency bands LTE transmit diversity is based on space- ficient use of radio resources. In other
that could not otherwise be used (too narrow frequency block coding (SFBC) techniques scenarios – for example, large cells and
duplex distance). Together, these solutions complemented with frequency-shift time di- heavy load – the basic channel qual-
make LTE fit nearly arbitrary spectrum al- versity (FSTD) when four transmit antennas ity does not allow for extensive multistream
locations. are used. Transmit diversity is primarily transmission. In this case, the multiple trans-
One challenge when designing a spectrum- intended for common downlink channels mit antennas are best used for single stream
flexible radio-access technology is to preserve that cannot make use of channel-dependent beamforming in order to enhance the quality
commonality between the spectrum and du- scheduling. It can, however, also be applied of the signal.
plexing modes. The frame structure that LTE to user-data transmission – for example, In the context of Figure 1, beamforming
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LTE spectrum (bandwidth and duplex)
flexibility. Half-duplex FDD is seen from a
terminal perspective.
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REFERENCES