LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

2.3 LTE-Advanced Requirements

The ITU-R defined the requirements for the IMT-Advanced such that the system should be able to [3]:

• Enable 100 Mbps peak data rate support for high mobility and up to 1 Gbps peak data rate for low mobility case;
• Allow inter-working with other radio access systems;
• Enabling high quality mobile services;
• Worldwide roaming capability;
• Flexibility to allows cost efficient support of wide range of service and applications.

Further there were requirements in the following areas:

• Cell spectral efficiency, ranging from the 3 bits/Hz/cell in the indoor downlink scenario, to the 0.7 bits/Hz/cell in the high speed uplink scenario;
• Peak spectral efficiency, ranging up to 15 bits/s/Hz;
• Bandwidth scalability up to and including 40 MHz, up to 100 MHz should also be considered;
• Cell edge user spectral efficiency, ranging from 0.015 bits/s/Hz up to 0.1 bits/s/Hz;
• Latency requirements for control plane to achieve 100 ms transition time between idle and active state, and respectively to enable 10 ms user plane latency (in unloaded conditions);
• Mobility support with up to 350 kmph (smaller data rate allowed compared to the stationary use case);
• Handover interruption of 27.5 ms for intra frequency case and 40 and 60 ms for the inter-frequency within the band and between the bands respectively;
• VoIP capacity, with the numbers of users ranging from 30 to 50 users per sector/MHz.

3GPP also defined its own requirements for LTE-Advanced, which are in many cases tighter ...