4G LTE Network

Introduction

Technology has revolutionized the world and has made many aspects of life simpler and easy to use. The advanced features offered by the technological advancement have created many options for the user, and provided speed and reliability, where users can carry out their work very efficiently. Technology is now moving towards the world of 4G, which provides advanced options and features in comparison with previous technologies.

Discussion

Convergence of mobile and internet puts pressure on mobile service providers to offer faster and more efficient mobile internet access. Today, High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) networks, are delivering high volumes of data transactions. Data usage due to smart phones will require larger air interface bandwidths. Long Term Evolution or LTE, on the other hand, 3GPP Release 8 to support larger bandwidths (G. Yuan, X. Zhang, W. Wang, and Y. Yang, pp. 8893). The requirements of LTE were to provide higher averaged user through output. It was specified to deliver services with high efficiency based on Internet Protocol (IP). Unlike HSPA, LTE adopts Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) in the downlink and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) in the uplink direction for resource sharing among multiple users. These multiple accesses increase network capacity and user throughput because of multi-user diversity gain. Operators can select various spectrum bandwidths, e.g., 1.4, 3, 5 10, 15, and 20 MHz depending on availability. 3GPP has further extended the original proposal of LTE, which is known as LTE-Advanced in Release 10. LTE-Advanced should, however, provide backward compatibility in terms of spectrum coexistence with Release 8 based LTE. to implement LTE-Advanced in a spectrum which is already occupied by LTE devices. Furthermore, LTE-Advanced will also use the same radio interface technology as LTE. ITU has specified IMT-Advanced data rate requirements of up to 1 Gbps and 500 Mbps in downlink and uplink directions, respectively, using Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) [3]. This could be achieved in 100 MHz band spectrum (S. Plass, X. G. Doukopoulos, and R. Legouable, pp. 4952).

For cellular based mobile communication use, i.e, below 3 GHz. Therefore, 3GPP developed Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology in Release 10 as a potential solution for increasing the LTE bandwidth to support higher data rates as required by IMT-Advanced. With LTE CA, the operators can scale the spectrum bandwidth and aggregate more than two spectrum bands. HSPA based cellular systems, under the name Dual Carrier HSPA ...