FEATURE LTE ADVANCED
Tooled up
An arsenal of technical solutions has been compiled that will boost the performance of LTE, creating the ‘True 4G’ of LTE Advanced. But opinions are divided over how soon it will arrive, and whether or not will even be necessary.
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echnology never sleeps and this in- dustry—as much as, if not more than any other—always has one eye on the
future. So while the momentum is now truly gathering behind LTE, with more than 237 op- erators in 85 countries investing in it, work is already well underway on the technology that will supersede it. And despite the industry’s marketing folk having seized on the oppor- tunity to promote LTE and HSPA as the next generation of cellular technology, it is LTE Advanced (LTE-A) that will usher in true 4G. That LTE-A is on the roadmap at all owes much to 3GPP’s desire to have a technology
approved by ITU-R for the 4G IMT-Advanced programme. The requirements for this were set out in 2008, with the headline throughput rates set at 100Mbps downlink in high mo- bility conditions and 1Gbps in low mobility scenarios.
3GPP concluded Release 10, the specifica-
tion for LTE-A, in December 2010. This does not represent a job completed, however. As Arne Schälicke, LTE marketing manager for Nokia Siemens Networks points out: “It is not that Release 10 has done everything that could be done for LTE-Advanced, it’s just the beginning.”
LTE Advanced will not involve the rollout
of a new network, as was the case with the arrival of the third generation. Instead it will be based on the deployment of a series of tech- nological enhancements to LTE (see box) that will, in various permutations and according to various timescales, be used to boost the performance of the base LTE standard. It is for this reason that some vendors liken the relationship between LTE-A and LTE to that between HSPA+ and HSPA. But the fact that implementations of these solutions will be selective and staggered might also raise issues in terms of definition.
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