DL/UL Acceleration Technologies

There are series of technologies in LTE-Advanced as shown in Figure 2. But new MIMO and Carrier Aggregation
(CA) are the two key technologies for DL/UL acceleration. These technologies will improve communication
performance and expand the effective bandwidth, enabling the maximum downlink speed of even up to 3 Gbps as
shown Figure 3.

Figure 2: New Technology Adaptation into LTE-Advanced

Figure 3: DL Acceleration with CA and MIMO

Carrier Aggregation
Carrier Aggregation (CA) is an innovative approach to create wider bandwidth by using multiple aggregated Carrier
Components (CCs). LTE Rel.10 adopts the CA technique to increase spectral bandwidth up to 100 MHz using
multiple CCs. The aggregated CCs must be on compatible spectral bandwidth supported by LTE Rel.8 (i.e., 1.4
MHz/3 MHz/5 MHz/10 MHz/15 MHz/20 MHz). It allows seamless migration into LTE Rel.10 by re-utilizing LTE Rel.8
eNB along with radio frequency (Figure 4), adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR), spectrum emission mask (SEM),
adjacent channel selectivity (ACS) and blocking.
As the LTE Rel.10 UEs are backward-compatible to LTE Rel.8 standards, it has great advantage on reducing
redundant implementation with this approach. Thus, CA-enabled LTE Rel.10 UE would achieve higher user
throughput than LTE Rel.8.
There are three types of CA, depending on CC combination as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 4: Carrier Aggregation

Figure 5: Three Types of Carrier Aggregation

1. Intra-band Contiguous CA
Contiguous bandwidth wider than 20 MHz is used in this scenario. For example, wideband such as 3.5 GHz band
would fit this model.

2. Inter-band Non-contiguous CA
Non-contiguous band over multiple bands is used in this scenario. Network with two spectrum bands (i.e., 2 GHz and
800 MHz) would fit this model. This scenario would have advantage on having higher throughput simply by two
carriers as well as the improvement on stable transmission by two different spatial paths on different spectrum bands.

3. Intra-band Non-contiguous CA
Non-contiguous band in same band is used in this scenario. This model would fit operators in North America or
Europe, who have fragmental spectrum in one band or share same cellular network.

CA Scenarios
There are four possible CA Scenarios in real LTE-Advanced deployment.

(a) Multiple CCs over contiguous bandwidth (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Overlapped Coverage

(b) CCs over different bands with different coverage in cells (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Different Coverage

(c) CCs cover cell edges of different CC cells (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Cell Edge Beamforming

(d) Macro-coverage with lower CC and Hotspot with RRH (Remote Radio Head) (Figure 9).
Figure 9: RRH Integration

New MIMO Techniques

LTE Rel.8 supported up to four layers of MIMO multiplexing for downlink and no MIMO for uplink. LTE-Advanced
supports single user MIMO (SU-MIMO) scheme up to eight layers (8x8 MIMO) for downlink and four layers (4x4
MIMO) for uplink. With this technology, it achieves peak spectral efficiency of 30 bit/s/Hz for downlink and 15
bit/sec/Hz for uplink. In other words, single 20MHz bandwidth to achieve up to 600Mbps downlink speed.

Figure 10: Closed-Loop MIMO (4x4 MIMO rank-2)

Figure 11: Rank Adaptation

Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) is also the important technology to increase peak data rate as well as the system
capacity and cell edge user throughput. MU-MIMO and CoMP transmission, which will be described later, are
applying various advanced signal processing techniques, e.g. dedicated downlink beamforming, adaptive
transmission power control, and multi cell simultaneous transmission.

CoMP Techniques
Coordinated multi-point transmission/reception (CoMP) is a DL/UL orthogonalization technique to improve system
capacity and cell edge user throughput. Currently, there are two different approaches for CoMP techniques (Figure
12). One approach is a decentralized autonomous control based on independent eNB architecture, and the other is a
centralized control based on remote radio equipment (RRE) architecture.

In the approach with independent eNB architecture, CoMP is performed by signaling between eNBs. This technique
can utilize legacy cells, but the disadvantage is signaling delay and other overheads. In the second approach with
RRE technique, the eNB can centralize and control all the radio resource by transmitting baseband data directly
between eNB and RREs on optical fiber connections. There is little signaling delay or other overheads in this
technique, and Intra-cell radio resource control is relatively easy. However, CAPEX on optical fibers is not negligible,
and centralized eNB must be able to accept higher load according to the number of RREs. Therefore, both
approaches are under consideration for LTE-Advanced.

Figure 12: Centralized/Autonomous Decentralized Control

1. Downlink CoMP

Downlink CoMP also has two approaches under consideration for LTE-Advanced, i.e., Coordinated
Scheduling/Beamforming (CS/CB) (Figure 13) and Joint Processing (Figure 14).
In CS/CB, the transmission to a single UE is performed from the serving cell, exactly as in the case of non-CoMP
transmission. However, the scheduling is dynamically coordinated between the cells, including any beamforming
functionality. In that way, the interference between different transmissions can be controlled and reduced. In principle,
schedule optimization will be performed based on the serving set of users, so that the transmitter beams are
constructed to reduce interference to other neighboring user, while increasing the served users signal strength.
In Joint Transmission feature of Joint Processing, the transmission to a single UE is simultaneously performed from
multiple transmission points in practice cell sites. The multi-point transmissions will be coordinated as a single
transmitter with multiple antennas that are geographically separated. This scheme has the potential for higher
performance, compared to CS/CB, but comes at the expense of more stringent requirement on backhaul
communication.

Figure 13: Centralized/Autonomous Decentralized Control

Figure 14: Centralized/Autonomous Decentralized Control

2. Uplink CoMP
Uplink CoMP utilizes geographically separated antennas for signal reception from UE, and scheduling decisions are
coordinated by multiple cells to control interference from each other. UE is not aware of multi-cell reception of its
signal, so that impact on radio interface specification is at minimal. Implementation of Uplink CoMP largely depends
on scheduler and receiver in the cells.