LTE Communications and Networks

1Introduction

Ghazanfar Ali Safdar and Masood Ur Rehman

School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK

Wireless communication has involved relentless years of research and design and comprises cellular telephony, broadcast and satellite television, wireless networking to today’s 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. However, cellular telephony networks surpass the others in terms of usage [1]. Although cellular networks were designed to provide mobile voice services and low rate mobile data services, data services have excelled voice and findings show that global data traffic has grown by 280% since 2008 and is expected to double annually in the next 5 years [2]. Importantly, it already exceeded those expectations by 2010 by nearly tripling and it is further predicted that by 2020 nearly 1 billion people will access the Internet using a wireless mobile device [3].

The introduction of new or the upgrade of existing wireless standards such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and 3GPP’s LTE have been developed to meet traffic and high data rates. Most of the methods to increase spectrum capacity in practice today are aligned towards; (1) improving the macro layer by upgrading radio access, (2) densifying the macro layer by reducing inter‐site distances and (3) the use of low power nodes to complement the macro layer ...