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LTE-Advanced: The leading technology in the new MBB era

LTE-Advanced: The leading technology in the new MBB era

In 1Q 2011, 3GPP released the first version of the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) protocol: LTE-A Release10. LTE-A has evolved from LTE technology to meet the requirements of IMTAdvanced, the fourth generation of mobile communications systems. LTE-A technology can dramatically increase the peak rate, peak spectral efficiency, average rate, average spectral efficiency, and celledge user performance. It improves networking efficiency across the entire network and will become the mainstream future wireless communications technology, riding the wave of the new MBB era.
By Shi Yong
he number of mobile users and mobile broadband users continues to grow rapidly, with the CAGR of the latter group increasing by 104% between 2007 and 2011. Infonetics estimates that the number of global mobile users will reach 5.2 billion in 2011, mobile broadband users will hit 5 billion, and traffic growth per user per year will exceed 50% over the next 10 years. As such, network traffic will grow by a staggering 500 times, requiring LTE-A to step in and underpin the required huge network capacity.

Key technologies of LTE-A

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LTE-A expands and enhances the basic LTE platform. It is characterized by flexible and effective spectrum utilization, higher spectral efficiency, simpler and optimized network architecture, and the ability to cut TCO and provide more services. LTE-A is backward compatible with LTE and represents its smooth evolution. LTE-A needs to support a bandwidth of up to 100MHz, a downlink peak rate of 1Gbps with an increased spectral efficiency of 30bps/Hz, an uplink peak rate of 500Mbps with an increased spectral efficiency of 15bps/Hz, and expand downlink and uplink MIMOs to 88 and 44 respectively. In t ro d u c i n g t h e f o l l ow i n g k e y technologies into LTE-A realizes these requirements: Carrier Aggregation (CA), Enhanced MIMO, Coordinated Multipoint Tx/Rx (CoMP), Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), and SelfOrganization Network (SON).

typical scenario that downlink bandwidth is greater than uplink bandwidth. CA not only dramatically increases spectrum resource utilization, but also helps operators flexibly combine bandwidth and solve spectra discontinuity to increase the users peak rate and network throughput. CA also poses no additional requirements on terminals receiving ability. Therefore, LTE-A terminals with a receiving ability of over 20MHz can receive multiple component carriers simultaneously, while LTE Rel.8 terminals can normally receive one component carrier.

Enhanced MIMO
Given that frequency resources are increasingly scarce, increasing channel c a p a c i t y t h ro u g h m u l t i - a n t e n n a s has been widely adopted in multiple standards. Notably, this is a key way of increasing LTE-As peak and average spectral efficiencies. LTE Rel.8 supports one, two, or four transmitting antennas on the downlink, two or four receiving antennas on the terminals, and a maximum of four layers of transmission on the downlink. On the uplink, LTE Rel.8 supports a single transmitting antenna on terminals and a maximum of four receiving antennas at base stations. The multi-antenna transmission mode of LTE Rel.8 includes open-loop MIMO, close-loop MIMO, beam forming, and transmission diversity. In addition to single-user MIMO, LTE also uses a multi-antenna transmission approach multi-user MIMO to increase spectral efficiency, which enables multiple users to use the same wireless transmission resource through space division. Based on LTE Rel.8, LTE-A supports a maximum of four transmitting antennas on the uplink. If the physical uplink shared channel (PUSC) adopts the single-user MIMO, LTE-A can support up to two codeword streams and four transmission layers. The PUSC can also improve transmission quality and coverage of uplink control information through transmission diversity. LTE-A supports

up to eight transmitting antennas on the downlink and can transmit two codeword s t re a m s a n d a m a x i m u m o f e i g h t transmission layers. This further increases the throughput and spectral efficiency of both uplink and downlink transmissions. On the downlink, LTE-A supports dynamic switching between singleuser MIMO and multi-user MIMO, and further boosts the performance of downlink multi-user MIMO through enhanced channel state information feedback and a new codebook design. LTE-A multi-antenna technology increases the peak and average spectral efficiencies and dramatically enhances capacity and coverage to improve network performance.

CoMP
CoMP enables cell-edge users to coordinate and simultaneously receive signals from and send signals to users of multiple cells. Downlink performance can be dramatically improved if the transmitted signals from multiple cells coordinate to avoid mutual interference. On the uplink, the signals of multiple cells are received and combined. If multiple cells are coordinated and scheduled simultaneously, inter-cell interference can be suppressed and the signal-to-noise ratio of the received signals can increase. Based on the relationships between the nodes to be coordinated, CoMP is mainly divided into two modes: intrasite CoMP and inter-site CoMP. Intrasite CoMP covers collaboration within a single site. As there is no restriction on backhaul capacity, large volumes of information can be exchanged between multiple cells within a site. In t e r - s i t e C o M P c ove r s m u l t i p l e site collaboration, which has higher requirements on backhaul capacity and delay. Currently, the performance of inter-site CoMP is limited by backhaul capacity and delays. CoMP includes downlink CoMP transmission and uplink CoMP reception. Uplink CoMP reception increases a celledge users throughput by receiving the
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CA
To meet peak rate requirements an uplink speed of 500Mbps and downlink speed of 1Gbps LTE-A must support a bandwidth of up to 100MHz. However, it is extremely difficult to find such high continuous bandwidth in currently available spectrum resources. Therefore, LTE-A integrates the key technology, Carrier Aggregation (CA), to fully utilize the spectrum resources scattered in multiple frequency bands. This not only enables high bandwidth, but also ensures backwards compatibility with LTE. The highest bandwidth currently supported by LTE is 20MHz. LTE-A aggregates multiple carriers that are backward compatible with LTE to support a bandwidth of up to 100MHz. LTE-A adopts three forms of CA continuous CA within the band, non-continuous CA within the band, and non-continuous CA outside of the band to aggregate multiple continuous or non-continuous component carriers. Given the asymmetry of uplink and downlink traffic, LTE-A can also aggregate asymmetric carriers in the

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LTE-Advanced: The leading technology in the new MBB era users data by coordinating multiple cells. Downlink CoMP transmission adopts two forms of collaboration joint processing and co-scheduling/beamforming depending on whether service data is obtained on multiple coordinated points. Joint processing occurs when multiple cells coordinate and act as a single virtual cell to serve terminals together. This usually obtains better transmission gains but has higher requirements on backhaul capacity and delay. Collaborative dispatch/beam forming dynamically exchanges information among multiple cells and coordinates the corresponding scheduling and transmission weights to minimize interference among multiple cells. The terminals must measure the channels of multiple cells and provide feedback, including the expected precoding vector from the serving cell and the interference precoding vector from the neighboring cells that produce strong interference. Coordinating the schedulers of multiple cells assists each cell to reduce interference on its neighboring cells when transmitting beams. This ensures the signal strength expected by the users of a cell. CoMP is a key LTE-A technology that effectively increases the average capacity of cells and the signal-tonoise ratio for cell-edge users. Although CoMP increases system complexity, its capacity and coverage advantages greatly outweigh its disadvantages.

On the path of LTE evolution to LTE-A, Huawei has fully addressed the main challenges facing mobile broadband networks. It has also designed and developed a range of leading products and solutions including 3mRRU, 4mRRU, AAS & AAA, and the HetNet with micro/pico/ femtocell solution.
can deploy more base station antennas to realize advanced MIMO technology. These measures raise expenditure and deployment complexity, greatly limiting the network performance evolution potential of a traditional macrocell. HetNet technology significantly increases network throughput and overall network efficiency by distributing low-power nodes in areas covered by macro base stations to form a heterogeneous system with different node types offering the same coverage. Low-power nodes include micro, pico, remote radio head (RRH), relay, and femtocell. Increasing small, low-power stations is cheap, flexible, and effectively increases network throughput. Small stations not only accurately offload the hotspots of the macrocell, but also cover macrocell blind spots. The key to HetNet is the collaboration of macro base stations and micro base stations, especially in terms of interference coordination and interoperability.

HetNet
Statistics show that 80% to 90% of future network throughput will take place in indoor and hotspot nomadic scenarios. Indoor, low-speed, and hotspot application scenarios will rise in importance in the mobile Internet era, requiring operators to use new technologies to enhance the user experience of traditional cellular networks in hotspot scenarios. In a traditional macrocell network, operators can obtain more spectra or add base stations (such as cell splitting) to increase supply capacity. Alternatively, they 51
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Huaweis innovations
Huawei is actively involved in the 3GPP work group with 1 chair, 3 vice chairs, and 32 reporters. Huawei

standard body comprising many senior experts continually contributes to core LTE/LTE-A technologies, based on their specialist knowledge of market demands, and rich product R&D and commercialization experience. At CTIA Wireless 2010, Huawei demonstrated LTE-advanced. Offering the worlds fastest downlink data transmission rate at 1.2Gbps over 40 times faster than current commercial 3G networks Huawei again set a new speed record for mobile broadband networks. On the path of LTE evolution to LTE-A, Huawei has fully addressed the main challenges facing mobile broadband networks. It has also designed and developed a range of leading products and solutions including the 3mRRU solution which features the lightest and smallest dual-transmission module in the industry, with ease of installation and maintenance; the 4mRRU solution which helps reduce the number of sites and modules to be configured, cut down combination insertion loss, simplify antenna system, save on TCO and support 5-band and 3-mode; adaptive antenna system (AAS) & adaptive antenna array (AAA) which, through integration of RF module and antenna, boast the simplest site installation, with improved site efficiency, saved TCO, enhanced network performance via beamforming, and boosted network capacity via cell splitting; and the HetNet with micro & pico & femtocell solution, which effectively offloads hotspots and covers blind zones in supplementing macro network, featuring easy and cost-efficient deployment of low-power nodes. These solutions offer multiple advantages including smaller and lighter modules, lower TCO, and the full utilization of available frequency bands to increase spectral efficiency and enhance system capacity. In the future, LTE-A will become the mainstream MBB technology. Huawei will continue to innovate and lay a solid foundation for LTE and LTE-A products and solutions to ensure MBB becomes broader and smarter.
Editor: Xue Hua xuehua@huawei.com