LTE Advanced

LTE Advanced (LTE+, or LTE-A)^[1] is a mobile communication standard and a major enhancement of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. It was formally submitted as a candidate 4G to ITU-T in late 2009 as meeting the requirements of the IMT-Advanced standard, and was standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in March 2011 as 3GPP Release 10.^[2]

The LTE+ format was first proposed by NTT DoCoMo of Japan and has been adopted as the international standard.^[3]

The work by 3GPP to define a 4G candidate radio interface technology started in Release 9 with the study phase for LTE-Advanced. Being described as a 3.9G (beyond 3G but pre-4G), the first release of LTE did not meet the requirements for 4G (also called IMT Advanced as defined by the International Telecommunication Union) such as peak data rates up to 1 Gb/s. The ITU has invited the submission of candidate Radio Interface Technologies (RITs) following their requirements in a circular letter, 3GPP Technical Report (TR) 36.913, "Requirements for Further Advancements for E-UTRA (LTE-Advanced)."^[4] These are based on ITU's requirements for 4G and on operators’ own requirements for advanced LTE. Major technical considerations include the following:

• Continual improvement to the LTE radio technology and architecture
• Scenarios and performance requirements for working with legacy radio technologies
• Backward compatibility of LTE-Advanced with LTE. An LTE terminal should be able to work in an LTE-Advanced network and vice versa. Any exceptions will be considered by 3GPP.
• Consideration of recent World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07) decisions regarding frequency bands to ensure that LTE-Advanced accommodates the geographically available spectrum for channels above 20 MHz. Also, specifications must recognize those parts of the world in which wideband channels are not available.

Likewise, 'WiMAX 2', 802.16m, has been approved by ITU as the IMT Advanced family. WiMAX 2 is designed to be backward compatible with WiMAX 1 devices. Most vendors now support conversion of 'pre-4G', pre-advanced versions and some support software upgrades of base station equipment from 3G.

The mobile communication industry and standards organizations have therefore started work on 4G access technologies, such as LTE Advanced.^[when?] At a workshop in April 2008 in China, 3GPP agreed the plans for work on Long Term Evolution (LTE).^[5] A first set of specifications were approved in June 2008.^[6] Besides the peak data rate 1 Gb/s as defined by the ITU-R, it also targets faster switching between power states and improved performance at the cell edge. Detailed proposals are being studied within the working groups.^[when?]

Three technologies from the LTE-Advanced tool-kit – carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256QAM modulation in the downlink – if used together and with sufficient aggregated bandwidth, can deliver maximum peak downlink speeds approaching, or even exceeding, 1 Gbit/s. Such networks are often described as ‘Gigabit LTE networks’ mirroring a term that is also used in the fixed broadband industry.^[7]