LTE introduction in 15 bullet points

15 bullet points on LTE Introduction: Long Term Evolution (LTE) starts from 3GPP Release 8.

3GPP Technical report 25.913 defines the key objectives of LTE as:

Support for a flexible transmission bandwidth up to 20MHz.

Peak downlink data rate of 100 Mbps when using 2 receive antenna at the UE.

Peak uplink data rate of 50 Mbps when using 1 transmit antenna at the UE.

Round trip time of less than 10 ms.

Downlink average spectrum efficiency improved 3 to 4 times relative to release 6 HSDPA.

Uplink average spectrum efficiency improved 3 to 4 times relative to release 6 HSUPA.

LTE has a flat architecture which minimizes the number of network elements.

LTE is optimized for PS services but supports to handle Circuit Switched (CS) services. e.g. CS fall back to UMTS.

LTE supports the Speech services using Voice over IP. Speech service can be supported by allowing the UE to fallback to UMTS, GSM or CDMA2000.

LTE Supports Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS) for the transmission of mobile TV.

Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division (TDD) versions of LTE have been standardized. Both allow channel bandwidths up to 20 MHz.

LTE allows inter working with existing GSM, UMTS and CDMA2000 technologies.

LTE uses QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM modulation schemes with OFDMA (downlink) and SC-FDMA(uplink) multiple access technologies.

LTE supports Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna technology for downlink direction.3GPP release 8 and 9 do not support MIMO in the Uplink direction.

Existing spectrum allocations can be re farmed for the introduction of LTE.

LTE simplifies network planning by minimizing the requirement for manually planned neighbor lists.

LTE includes Self Organising Network (SON) functionality to help automate network configuration, optimization, fault finding and fault handling.

LTE Advanced starts from 3GPP release 10. LTE Advanced introduced Carrier Aggregation to provide wider effective channel bandwidths. It also introduces MIMO in the uplink direction as well as increasing the number of antenna elements which can be used for MIMO in the downlink direction.

Other technologies continue to develop in parallel to LTE, e.g. UMTS introduces HSPA+ with MIMO, 64QAM and multi carrier Transmission allowing effective channel bandwidths of 10, 20 and 40 MHz.