Appendix D3GPP Releases
Product Management, Ericsson, India
D.1 Introduction
The ever‐increasing demand for data services and the advent of new applications on devices compelled telecom service providers to look for a technology which can keep pace with such phenomenal evolution and at the same time provides for a common technology platform for a complete ecosystem. LTE technology evolved over the years in 3GPP to address these widely different technical requirements from mobile broadband to IoT.
The following sections describe the journey of LTE RAN in 3GPP specifications from Release 8 to Release 14.
D.2 Release 8
Release 8 introduced LTE for the first time, with a completely new radio interface enabling substantially improved data performance compared with previous 2G‐, 3G‐ and CDMA‐based systems. LTE radio systems met user demand for higher data rates and quality of service, were optimised for the packet switch system and avoided fragmentation of technologies for paired (FDD) and unpaired (TDD) band operation. The main requirements for the new access network were high spectral efficiency, the capability to support high peak data rates, short round trip time, and flexibility in frequency and bandwidth. The salient features introduced in Release 8 include:
- OFDMA in downlink, SC‐FDMA in uplink. OFDM is a multicarrier technology subdividing the available bandwidth into a multitude of mutual orthogonal narrowband subcarriers. In uplink, the SC‐FDMA solution ...