India: TRAI Releases Consultation Paper on IMT-Advanced

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released a consultation paper on IMT- Advanced Mobile Wireless Broadband Services. International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced) systems offers higher bandwidth, higher data rate, lower authentication load, and will support higher level of user-level customization.

The key issues raised in the consultation paper are suitable spectrum bands, block size of spectrum to be auctioned, maximum spectrum permitted to bidder, eligibility criteria for bidding, rollout obligations, spectrum usage charges, QoS parameters, security issues and other related issues.

Written comments on the issues raised in this consultation paper are invited from the stakeholders by 20th September, 2011 and counter-comments on the comments by 27th September, 2011.

3GPP LTE Advanced (based on 3GPP release 10) and IEEE 802.16m WirelessMAN Advanced have been accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced technology by ITU.

IMT and IMT-Advanced has identified 450 MHz, 585–806 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 1900 MHz, 2,1 GHz, 2.3-2.4GHz, 2.5-2.69 GHz, 3.3-3.4 GHz and 3.4–3.6 GHz bands for mobile broadband services.

In India, 800 MHz and 900 MHz spectrum bands are presently being used for 2G mobile services. Though, TRAI has recommended to reframe it and allocate for the IMT services. At present spectrum in these bands is not available. For reframing these bands 1900 MHz bands & 1800 MHz bands can be allocated when available.

Spectrum has been auctioned in the blocks of 2x5MHz in the 2.1GHz band for 3G services. If additional spectrum is available in the 2100 MHz band, it will be utilized for 3G services only.

In this scenarios, following spectrum bands are only available for future technologies in India :

- 700 MHz band (698-806 MHz)

- 2010-2025 MHz band

- 2.3-2.4 GHz band

- 2.5-2.69 GHz band

- 3.4-3.6 GHz band

The 700 MHz (698-806 MHz) spectrum band is considered the most important band for broadband deployment. It is suitable from the point of both capacity and coverage. TRAI has recommended that 698-806 MHz be earmarked only for IMT applications.

2.3-2.4 GHz Band has been allocated for IMT applications including BWA. Out of the total 100 MHz spectrum, 40 MHz has been allocated for BWA services. As per TRAI, remaining 60 MHz of spectrum in this band (currently with Government agencies and captive users) needs to be reframed in a short span of time.

source: LteWorld

Carrier Aggregation for LTE-Advanced

To meet LTE-Advanced requirements, support of wider transmission bandwidths is required than the 20 MHz bandwidth specified in 3GPP Release 8/9. The preferred solution to this is carrier aggregation. It is of the most distinct features of 4G LTE-Advanced. Carrier aggregation allows expansion of effective bandwidth delivered to a user terminal through concurrent utilization of radio resources across multiple carriers. Multiple component carriers are aggregated to form a larger overall transmission bandwidth.

3GPP specifies carrier aggregation in LTE as following

• Rel-8/9 backward compatible carriers are the basic building blocks and to be supported
• Rel-10 signalling to support aggregation of up to 5 DL of component carriers and 5 UL of component carriers, irrespective of intra- or inter-band Carrier Aggregation (CA).
• Rel-10 to support both intra- and inter-band aggregation for both DL & UL in FDD
• Rel-10 to support inter-band aggregation with different signal reception timings across of component carriers of different bands for FDD DL
• UE-specific asymmetric number of component carriers in DL and UL
• Component carriers can have any of the bandwidths supported in Rel-8

Contiguous & non-contiguous carrier aggregation

Two or more component carriers can be aggregated to support wider transmission bandwidths up to 100 MHz. Spectrum deployment can be either contiguous or non-contiguous. Support for carrier aggregation feature requires enhancement to the 3GPP LTE Release 8 & 9 physical, MAC, and RRC protocol layers. To an LTE Release 8 terminal, each component carrier will appear as an LTE carrier, while an LTE-Advanced terminal can use the total aggregated bandwidth.

source: LteWorld

Qualcomm Webinar: LTE Advanced

This Qualcomm webinar was presented last month, it examines LTE Advanced and provides a high-level view into how it helps operators make the next performance leap.

Qualcomm Webinar: LTE Advanced

LTE Release 10 and Beyond (LTE-Advanced)

A very informative 3GPP presentation, Radio Access Networks - LTE progress report, May 24, 2010, Takehiro Nakamura, 3GPP TSG-RAN Chairman

See a snapshot below

From LTE

source: LteWorld

What is LTE-Advanced?

The ITU has coined the term IMT Advanced to identify mobile systems whose capabilities go beyond those of IMT 2000. In order to meet this new challenge, 3GPPs Organizational Partners have agreed to widen 3GPP’s scope to include systems beyond 3G.

In 2008 3GPP held two workshops on IMT Advanced, where the “Requirements for Further Advancements for E-UTRA” were gathered. The resulting Technical Report 36.913 is now published (June 08) and a liaison was sent to ITU-R covering the work in 3GPP RAN on LTE-Advanced towards IMT-Advanced.

Why “Advanced”?

The ITU has coined the term IMT Advanced to identify mobile systems whose capabilities go beyond those of IMT 2000. In order to meet this new challenge, 3GPPs Organizational Partners have agreed to widen 3GPP’s scope to include the development of systems beyond 3G.

Some of the key features of IMT-Advanced will be;

• Worldwide functionality & roaming
• Compatibility of services
• Interworking with other radio access systems
• Enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility)

LTE-Advanced Requirements

In 2008 3GPP held two workshops on IMT Advanced, where the “Requirements for Further Advancements for E-UTRA” were gathered. The resulting Technical Report 36.913 is now published.

General requirements for Advanced E-UTRA and Advanced E-UTRAN states that Advanced E-UTRA and Advanced E-UTRAN shall be an evolution of Release 8 E-UTRA and E-UTRAN. Further, Advanced E-UTRA and Advanced E-UTRAN shall meet or exceed IMT-Advanced requirements.

As per requirements Advanced E-UTRA should support significantly increased instantaneous peak data rates. At a minimum, Advanced E-UTRA should support the key feature of IMT-Advanced which is stated in the Circular Letter from the ITU-R as "enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility were established as targets for research)". The system should target a downlink peak data rate of 1 Gbps and an uplink peak data rate of 500 Mbps.

The overall C-Plane/U-Plane latency shall be significantly decreased compared to EPS Rel-8.

Over all 36.913 specifies a number of more requirments in the areas of System performance, Deployment, E-UTRAN architecture and migration.

See LteWorld link to know more about LTE-Advanced.