LTE, LTE-Advanced and WiMAX: Towards IMT-Advanced Networks

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Introduction

Without doubt, both cellular phones and the Internet have had a great impact on our lives. Since their introduction in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the demand for cell phones has had a steady growth in terms of usage and popularity. Initially aimed at “mobilizing” telephony service, mobile communications have gone from bettering voice quality, to adding basic exchanges, to the currently witnessed proliferation of delivering fully fledged multimedia services. This latter evolution was motivated, and made feasible, by the exponential popularity that the Internet has undergone since its introduction to the general public in the mid 1990s. Indeed, the Internet has evolved much since then, and has managed to span the introduction of various multimedia services, ranging from emails and file transfers, to live voice and video streams. By the end of the 1990s, extending Internet services to mobile telecommunications was foreseen as a natural evolution. The many efforts made at the time pursuing such extension—both in the industrial and research sectors can already be seen in today's widely deployed Third Generation (3G) networks. The popularity of today's 3G networks was further strengthened by the introduction of truly smart cellular phones, or smart phones, which featured highly usable interfaces and ease of installation of software applications and packages. Figure 1.1 shows the 3G coverage in the some countries, as calculated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation ...