Chapter 1
General
1.1 Introduction
This chapter introduces the contents of the book. It includes high-level information about the LTE system and design, and instructions how to use the modular structure of the chapters in an efficient way in different phases of LTE/SAE network planning, rollout, operation and optimization. As the book is practical, it is suitable for network operators, equipment manufacturers, service providers, and educational institutes at many levels.
1.2 The LTE Scene
Long-Term Evolution (LTE), as its name indicates, has been planned to meet the ever growing demands of mobile communications network customers in the forthcoming years. This new system provides considerably higher data rates and lower latency in order to deliver multimedia content in an efficient way, which benefits the end-users (who experience improved data transfer and communications) as well as the operators, who can optimize the network infrastructure to provide high-capacity and high-speed data communications.
Telecommunications and the content of the information are based increasingly on the Internet Protocol (IP), via multiple transport solutions. Information delivery was traditionally based on the circuit-switched (CS) domain until the late 1990s for data, and up to now for voice traffic. The LTE concept indicates that the trend for all content is definitely towards IP because the LTE specifications do not even define circuit-switched interfaces any more. The lack ...
