LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

Preface

The data usage growth in the mobile networks has been very fast during the last few years: the networks have turned rapidly from voice-dominated into data-dominated. The data growth has been fuelled by the availability of mobile broadband coverage and by the higher data rate capabilities. LTE networks were launched early 2009 pushing the data rates up to 100 Mbps. The LTE-capable devices including smartphones and tablet computers became widely available during 2012 boosting the demand for LTE networks and data rates. The further evolution continues on top of LTE, called LTE-Advanced, pushing the data rates beyond 1 Gbps and increasing the system capacity. This book presents 3GPP LTE-Advanced technology in Release 10 and evolution to Release 11 and beyond. The expected practical performance is also illustrated in this book.

The book is structured as follows. Chapter 1 presents an introduction. The standardization schedule and process is described in Chapter 2. An overview of LTE in Release 8 and 9 is given in Chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 present the carrier aggregation solution in downlink and in uplink. Chapters 6 and 7 illustrate the multiantenna Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) techniques in downlink and in uplink. The multilayer and multitechnology heterogeneous networks are covered in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 introduces relays and their benefits, and Chapter 10 describes Self-Organizing Network (SON) algorithms. The radio performance evaluation is discussed in Chapter ...