LTE Standards

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LTE Standards and Architecture

1.1. 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP)

1.1.1. 3GPP history

3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) is a “de facto standard body”. It is not the only organization of this kind; let us quote OMA for the mobile services, 3rd generation partnership project 2 (3GPP2) for the Qualcomm CDMA IS95 system, and IEEE with its very successful 802 series. More selective for the choice of its members is “liberty alliance”. And there are plenty of others, with a more or less long lifetime.

ITU-T has been the only worldwide body for telecommunication standards since 1866. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has the possibility to consider the proposals rising from regional standardization bodies, which are backed by their state, like ANSI for the United States. ETSI was established by the European Union in order to fulfill this kind of task.

“De facto standard bodies” are popping up and proliferating due to the will of industry and of the operators, without any recognition from the legal authorities. Nevertheless, the work they are realizing makes technology progress.

The development of the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) standard in the 1980s has been obtained essentially through a common work of state owned laboratories, in the framework of post and telecommunication administrations, such as CNET in France and FTZ in Germany.

When the continuation of the drafting of various change requests was transferred to European Telecommunication ...