LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

2.1 Introduction

This chapter presents the Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced standardization aspects. The standardization of LTE-Advanced is handled by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). 3GPP produced also the earlier LTE versions, Release 8 and 9, as well as the Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) Releases (and later GSM evolution Releases also). 3GPP has become the leading standards forum for the 4th generation mobile communication systems, following the wide adoption of LTE and LTE-Advanced technology path as the future choice by all the major operators from WCDMA/HSPA, CDMA and WiMAX technology camps. The 3GPP consists of all the major vendors and equipment manufacturers, including all the global players providing infrastructure, terminals, chipsets or wireless test equipment. The 3GPP is consisting of 384 member organizations and approximately 4000 delegate days every month invested in progressing the technology with around 9000 change requests approval to the specifications annually. Tens of thousands of input documents are submitted from different companies to different 3GPP working groups each year. The 3GPP structure and process is covered more detail in [1]. This chapter introduces the relevant 3GPP Release schedule for LTE-Advanced and then presents an overview of the LTE-Advanced study phase done before the actual specification work started in 3GPP. The requirements set for LTE-Advanced by the 3GPP community, as well as ITU-R for the ...