NSN White paper

February 2014

LTE Release 12
and Beyond

CONTENTS
1.Introduction

2.Technology enablers coming with Release 12

2.1 Small cell enhancements

2.2 Carrier aggregation enhancements
2.3 Macro cell enhancements
2.4 Machine-Type Communications (MTC)
2.5 3GPP-WLAN radio level interworking
2.6 LTE Unlicensed
2.7Network Assistend Interference
Cancellations and Suppression (NAICS)
2.8 Further enhancements

4
6
7
8
9
10
11
11

3.Summary

13

4. Further reading

15

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1.Introduction
Living up to what LTE promised, commercial LTE deployments have
shown that LTE networks can deliver peak data rates of up to 150
Mbps and average data rates of tens of Mbps as well as latencies
below 20 milliseconds. The next step in LTE evolution has already been
made, with LTE-Advanced pushing peak data rates beyond 1 Gbps and
enhancing multi-band and multi-antenna operation that is compatible
with existing deployments. The first LTE-A feature being commercial
deployed e.g. in Korea is carrier aggregation.
The continuing demand for ever more capacity is driven largely by
video usage. As outlined by Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN) in
its Vision 2020, a 1,000 fold increase in network capacity requires
increases in all dimensions:

MIMO &
adv. receiver

Carrier
Aggregation

Advanced
macros

Smart
Scheduler

New bands

HetNet
management

eCoMP

ASA

Flexible
small cells

As the media-intense lifestyle is set to penetrate all social

environments, another issue is end users continually rising
expectations of throughput and service - by 2020, a typical user
will consume 1 Gbyte of data per day. Finally, operators need to
secure their share of the mobile broadband market by improving
their operational efficiency and network robustness, developing
new business opportunities, extending their spectrum and by
protecting their investment.
LTE Release 12 and beyond will provide the initial enablers of
meeting these challenging demands as well as a smooth way
towards 4G / 5G era.

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2.Technology enablers coming with

Release 12
Release 12 enhancements focus on four areas of Capacity, Coverage,
Coordination (between cells), and Cost. Improvements in these
areas are based on using several technology enablers: small cell
enhancements, macro cell enhancements and Machine-Type
Communications (MTC). These enablers are described in this paper.
Customer experience, capacity and coverage will be improved with
small cell enhancements, based on inter-site Carrier Aggregation,
LTE-WLAN integration and macro cell enhancements. Small cell
enhancements are also known as enhanced local access.
Improvements in capacity and a more robust network performance are
achieved by 3D Beamforming/MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output),
advanced user equipment (UE) receivers and evolved Coordinated
Multipoint (CoMP) techniques, as well as through Self-Organizing
Networks for small cell deployments.
Finally, new spectrum footprint and new business will be opened up
by optimizing the system for Machine-Type Communications, as well
as by, for example, using LTE for public safety.

Capacity

Coverage

Small cell
enhancements
Macro cell
enhancements

1000x capacity
increase

1 GB per day per

user everywhere

Carrier Aggregation
enhancements

Coordination

Cost

Machine-Type
Communications
SON, WLAN integration,
public safety

Eciency and
robustness

New business, new

spectrum footprint

Figure 1: The Focus (a.k.a. The Four Cs), the Enablers, the Benefits

2.1 Small cell enhancements

The increasing traffic load will require more cells and more capacity to
cope with the expected throughput. Release 12 enhancements help
small cell deployments in two main areas - reducing mobility signaling
in high density cell deployments and improving user data rates by
using macro cells and small cells together.

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The high number of small cells will increase signaling traffic in the core
network as users move frequently from one small cell to another. This
situation will be improved by separating the user plane and control
plane functions in the Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture, that is,
letting the macro layer manage the mobility while offloading high data
traffic to the small cells.
Dual connectivity (Inter-site Carrier Aggregation) i.e. carrier
aggregation between sites is an attractive solution for HetNets
that do not have an ideal backhaul network. Dual connectivity
allows mobility management to be maintained on the macro layer
while aggregating small cells to provide extra user plane capacity,
increasing the throughput. Inter-site carrier aggregation is one
of NSNs innovations in the small cell area. The concept optimizes
performance by combining the benefits of macro cell coverage and
small cell capacity. Based on increasing the bandwidth through carrier
aggregation, inter-site carrier aggregation can provide a cell edge gain
of 50%, even in loaded networks.
Figure 2 below describes how, in order to support dual connectivity,
the radio protocols of the user plane are split between the Master eNB
(MeNB, typically a macro cell) and the Secondary eNB (SeNB, typically
a small cell). With such a protocol architecture, radio bearers carrying
user data can either use resources of the macro cell only (depicted
in grey), of the small cell only (depicted in light grey) or aggregate
both (depicted in orange), depending on whether coverage, offload or
throughput is to be favored.
In addition to higher layer related enhancements, Release 12 improves
also physical layer capabilities in small cell environment. Introduction
of 256 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) in downlink enhances
the spectrum efficiency for UEs experiencing favorable channel
conditions. Another improvement area is to reduce transition time for
dormant cell on/off with enhanced small cell discovery. This provides
improved opportunities for energy saving and allows further reduction
of Cell-Specific Reference Signals (CRS) interference in varying traffic
load conditions.

S1

S1

PDCP

PDCP

RLC

RLC

X2

PDCP
RLC

RLC

MAC

MAC

MeNB

SeNB

Figure 2: Dual connectivity

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TDD

FDD

Figure 3. FDD/TDD aggregation

2.2 Carrier aggregation enhancements

The work on enhancing the carrier aggregation capabilities in Release
12 will enable the use of FDD/TDD carrier aggregation. The Release 10
based carrier aggregation allows to aggregate FDD carriers for intra
or inter-band case and respectively TDD carriers for intra or interband case. But Release 12 will enable aggregating also co-located FDD
and TDD carriers to a single UE, as shown in Figure 3. As part of the
small cell enhancements the aggregation will be further extended to
support aggregation between sites, thus enabling inter-site carrier
aggregation between the macro and small cell sites.
The work on the RF and performance requirements is enabling also
support for downlink carrier aggregation with 3 downlink carriers, up
to 60 MHz of total spectrum being aggregated. This will enable data
rates of up to 450 Mbps being supported, as illustrated in Figure 4.
As part of the Release 12 work also the use of non-backwards
compatible New Carrier Type (NCT) was also considered but concluded
that the obtainable small gains did not justify the resulting market
fragmentation.

Higher peak data rate

20 MHz

150 Mbps

20 MHz

150 Mbps

20 MHz

150 Mbps

450 Mbps

Figure 4. Aggregating 3 downlink carriers with carrier aggregation.

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2.3 Macro cell enhancements

With exponential growth in network traffic, future networks need
to continue to evolve both in macro and small cells. There are
opportunities to enhance the network capacity and coverage of current
LTE macro cell deployment significantly by exploiting multi-antennas,
advanced receivers, network architectures and new spectrum. Macro
cell enhancements are attractive for operators because they allow
further exploiting of the existing base station sites and transport
infrastructure.
Base stations such as the NSNs Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station
establish high capacity macro cells with the potential to double the
spectral efficiency of existing LTE macro networks. The target is to
support LTE and LTE-Advanced technology in the 700-2600 MHz
bands, tight coordination with small cells, for example in the 3.5 GHz
band, and combinations of the following features:
Large number of transmit and receive antennas: more than four
transmit and receive antennas
Active Antenna Systems (AAS) where antenna and RF are built
together
AAS with vertical sectorization and user specific elevation
beamforming/3-D MIMO
Advanced uplink receivers
Enhanced Cooperative Multipoint Transmission and Reception (eCoMP)
Advanced radio network architecture including on-site resource
pooling
High capacity backhaul
Authorized Shared Access (ASA) to gain access to more IMT
spectrum
By increasing the number of transmit and receive antennas at the base
stations from two to four and then to eight, a significant gain in network
capacity can be achieved. This gain can be further enhanced by using
advanced receiver and single-user and multi-user MIMO schemes
(SU/MU MIMO) based on dedicated demodulation reference signals.
Using active antennas where the RF components are integrated
into the antenna and performing vertical sectorization or sector
specific elevation beamforming (using two fixed beams per sector)
can give significant improvements in sector capacity compared to a
single beam system. Building upon vertical sectorization, Release 12
will be developing two techniques namely a) UE-specific elevation
beamforming that adds UE specific vertical beamsteering to existing
azimuth-only closed loop SU/MU MIMO methods and b) 3D-MIMO
techniques that simultaneously exploit both the azimuth and the
elevation dimensions of the multipath channel on a user-specific
basis. These techniques are expected to give significant improvements
in both the cell edge and sector capacity.
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UE-specic elevation
beamforming/3D-MIMO

Figure 5: UE-specific 3D-MIMO

Next in line for deployment are centralized solutions like cluster
level on-site resource pooling using high capacity and low latency
fiber backhaul (Centralized RAN) where a baseband pool serves the
macro site and underlay remote radio heads. Such a radio network
architecture allows for further improvements in radio performance.
Following the study of centralized scheduling with non-ideal backhaul,
work is being done also for the enhanced CoMP focusing on the
scenario where benefits were identified, namely the case between
a macro and small cell. In such a scenario and a macro cell may
coordinated the scheduler for the small cells in the same coverage area.
Last but not least, networks evolve by exploiting Authorized Shared
Access / Licensed Shared Access a new and complementary way of
authorizing spectrum use in addition to exclusive licensed spectrum
which leads to higher spectrum availability and predictable QoS in the
shared spectrum, thereby increasing the number of subscribers and
the capacity of the network.

2.4 Machine-Type Communications

The number of embedded machine-to-machine modems is expected
to increase substantially in the future. While the urban area today can
have up to 5,000-10,000 subscribers per base station. The growth of
machine-to-machine could see up to 100,000 connected devices per
base station, setting new requirements for the mobile network.
In addition to the already specified MTC support in 3GPP, the following
areas of optimization are expected to be covered in Release 12:

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 Network load optimizations will continue: MTC-specific signaling

and connectivity optimizations ensure that a very large number of
connected devices can be supported by the LTE radio, with small
data amounts are delivered efficiently.
The low cost MTC device studies are completed. Based on these,
3GPP is defining a new UE category which is cost optimized for MTC
operations. 3GPP studies showed that for the RF part, with the
UE using only a single receive antenna and half-duplex operation,
significant saving can be achieved. On the baseband side, significant
saving can be achieved from single receive antenna, bandwidth
reduction, and peak data rate reduction. The studies indicated that
with the peak data rate reduction, bandwidth reduction and single
receiver chain together modem cost saving of approximately 60%
could be obtained.
Some MTC UEs are installed in the extreme coverage scenario and
might have characteristics such as very low data rate and greater delay
tolerance. Release 12 solutions will provide a relative LTE coverage
improvement corresponding to 15 dB for FDD for UEs operating
delay tolerant MTC applications with respect to their respective
nominal coverage. This is achieved by means of various techniques
such as further repetition, power boosting and simplification of
certain control channel functionalities.

2.5 3GPP-WLAN radio level interworking

3GPP has made a RAN level study on the mechanisms for enabling
enhancements for the radio level 3GPP-WLAN interworking.
Current ANDSF (Access network discovery and selection function)
based methods for access network selection and traffic routing do
not consider neither RAN network conditions nor take e.g. WLAN
load conditions into account. The mere presence of a WLAN network
allowed by ANDSF rules along with acceptable radio signal strength is
used to divert traffic from 3GPP RAN network to a WLAN network.
RAN level assistance for 3GPP-WLAN interworking is targeted for the
situation where typical WLAN selections are not enough (i.e. legacy
device behavior is not sufficient) to achieve sufficient load balancing
between cellular and WLAN, ensuring the Quality of Experience of
the user, etc. The reason for load balancing or traffic steering may be
due to dynamic load situation in both WLAN and 3GPP radio access
networks. With todays solutions, load is not considered as part of
the WLAN selection process. The intention of load balancing is to
steer by the eNB initiative the UE traffic to use either the operator
controlled WLAN or the RAN, depending on the dynamic needs. Only
RAN has a comprehensive overview of its load situations and resource
allocation strategies.

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As part of Release 12 the intention is to specify mechanism for

3GPP/WLAN access network selection and traffic steering. The
introduced solution supports deployments with and without ANDSF
and co-existence of ANDSF with RAN rules when both are deployed.
In the defined mechanism the RAN assistance parameters are
transferred via system broadcast and/or dedicated signaling. In the
network without enhanced ANDSF deployment or with UE without
ANDSF support these RAN assistance parameters are used within
RAN rules defined within RAN WG specifications. In the networks with
ANDSF support and with ANDSF capable UEs the RAN assistance
parameters are used as part of the ANDSF policies.

2.6 LTE Unlicensed

A new study area emerging in 3GPP is the use of LTE for unlicensed
(LTE-U) spectrum. Such a solution would complement LTE operation
especially in the public hotspot or enterprise type of environment,
as shown in Figure 6. This would allow the operator to benefit from
the local extra capacity from the unlicensed spectrum without
having to use alternative technologies with special interworking and
admission control arrangements. The solutions are foreseen not to
be standalone but always being used with aggregation to the licensed
band LTE operation.

Public indoor cells

Home cells to rely

on Wi-Fi (or femto)

Outdoor hot spot

Coordinated with macro/micro cells

Figure 6. LTE-U application environment.

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2.7Network Assistend Interference

Cancellations and Suppression (NAICS)
Co-channel interference is the dominant limiting factor for achieving
higher capacity in cellular networks. In addition to various interference
coordination schemes, interference aware receivers attempting to
mitigate co-channel interference have show promising performance
gain compared to receivers considering co-channel interference
as AWGN (Additive white Gaussian noise).
Specifying interference rejection combining (IRC) receiver UE
performance requirements in Release 11 was the first step towards
increasing the receiver role in the system design.
The first steps have been taken also with non-linear interference
cancellation receivers. Release 11 specified UE performance
requirements for CRS interference mitigation for heterogeneous
deployments where co-channel interference from CRS dominates but
is negligible from data assuming that data resource element muting
is in use.
Release 12 enhancements to intra-cell and inter-cell interference
mitigation at the receiver side are achieved by increasing the
degree of knowledge about interfering transmissions with possible
assistance in the network. Network assistance enables usage of more
advanced receiver (including non-linear receivers) and improves the
performance compared to Release 11 IRC that does not require any
transmission assistance in the network.
A specific intra-cell interference scenario part of Release 12
studies is SU-MIMO. Applying advanced receivers to mitigate interstream interference with SU-MIMO can be done without additional
network assistance. It is enough to just define new UE performance
requirements for this scenario.

2.8 Further enhancements

Self Organizing Networks (SON) will play a key role in the efficient
operation of dense small cells. Mass deployments will introduce
new requirements in SON functions to ensure proper cell identity
management and neighbor cell relations, as well as to enhance
mobility robustness and load balancing in small cell coverage gaps.
Additionally, intelligent solutions to easily switch small cell capacity
layers to a power saving mode will be essential.

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LTE as the global 4G standard is also attracting the attention of public

safety organizations and authorities, as a strong candidate to take
their communication systems to a new level. To this end, LTE will be
optimized to meet service requirements set by mission-critical group
communication, including aspects like fast and efficient set-up of
a low-delay communication path connecting any number of users
possibly co-located, with the uncompromised robustness also at
mobility familiar from todays 3GPP systems.
Further enhancements to LTE TDD for uplink-downlink interference
management and traffic adaptation (eIMTA) enable dynamic uplinkdownlink reconfiguration according to instantaneous traffic statistics
while maintaining backwards compatibility. The eIMTA feature improving
TDD capabilities in Release 12 can provide significant performance
benefits in small cells environment.
Furthermore, 3GPP will look for new opportunities to enhance LTEHSPA integration and LTE-WLAN interworking as well as to enable
device-to-device discovery and communication for commercial and
public safety use.

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3.Summary
LTE evolution continues strongly in Release 12 and beyond by
enhancing LTE and LTE-Advanced operation. In particular, LTE
Release 12 addresses coordinated small cell deployments, macro
cell enhancements, discovery in device-to-device communication,
enhanced SON, flexible deployment and improved interference
management in HetNets.
Release 12 features aim at boosting performance and at entering
new areas and spectrum. The following two tables summarize the
most promising Release 12 features:

Benefits from 3GPP Release 12 Boost Performance

Rel12 Feature

Benefit

Small Cell Enhancement based on

Inter-site CA

Optimized small cell mobility by reducing RAN to CN signaling

Improved data rates by using macro and small cells together
More flexible TDD spectrum use

UE-specific elevation beamforming/

3D-MIMO

Significantly enhanced macro cell capacity and coverage

Advanced receivers

Removing interference to increase UL and DL capacity

Enhanced Coordinated Multi-Point

(eCoMP)

Enhance coverage by exploiting coordination in case of non-ideal

backhaul

Enhanced SON

Efficient operation of dense small cell deployments

Energy savings in small cell capacity layers

Benefits from 3GPP Release 12 Expand to New Areas and New Spectrum
Rel12 Feature

Benefit

LTE-WLAN integration

10 Mbps minimum DL data rate

1000x hot spot capacity in present decade

LTE-HSPA integration

Enhanced multi-technology support

Machine-Type Communication (MTC)

Get prepared for 50 Bn connected devices or 100.000 devices per cell

Public safety

Secure operators market share by expanding LTE footprint

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NSN is a leading contributor in 3GPP, driving LTE and LTE-Advanced

standards. It is also shaping 5G through various activities, including
participation in the EU FP7 collaborative project METIS and contribution
to ITU-R IMT vision work.

2020+
2015+
2013+
2010+

5G

LTE Advanced Evolution

Rel-12 and Rel-13

LTE Advanced
Rel-10 and Rel-11

LTE
Rel-8 and Rel-9

Figure 7: The radio evolution in the present decade

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4. Further reading
LTE-Advanced The advanced LTE toolbox for more efficient delivery
of better user experience, NSN White Paper
Deployment Strategies for Heterogeneous Networks, NSN
White Paper
Release 12 and beyond for C4 (Cost, Coverage, Coordination of
small cells, and Capacity), NSN 3GPP presentation
Looking ahead to 5G, NSN White Paper
NSN Technology Vision

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Nokia Solutions and Networks

P.O. Box 1
FI-02022
Finland
Visiting address:
Karaportti 3, ESPOO, Finland
Switchboard +358 71 400 4000
Product code C401-00946-WP-201402-1-EN
2014 Nokia Solutions and Networks. All rights reserved.
Public
NSN is a trademark of Nokia Solutions and Networks. Nokia is a registered
trademark of Nokia Corporation. Other product names mentioned in this
document may be trademarks of their respective owners, and they are
mentioned for identification purposes only.

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