Long Term Evolution (LTE)

LTE is a Radio Access Network (RAN) technology, which

aims to improve network performance significantly in
comparison with other similar technologies.
It aims at providing 300Mbps in DL and 75Mbps in UL.
It is an asymmetric network!
It uses OFDMA and SC-FDMA in DL and UL respectively.
LTE-A aims at providing 1Gbps data rates.
Samsung Electronics have recently claimed the
introduction of 5G!
Largest deployment of LTE network so far has been
reported in the US, while Korea comes in second.
 Long Term Evolution (LTE)

M. Pesavento and W. Mulder, “LTE Tutorial (Part-1): LTE Basics”, Femto Forum Plenary, 2010.
Technical Report, “4G Mobile Broadband Evolution: Rel 10, 11 and Beyond”, 4G Americas, 2012.
Commercial Deployment
 Voice and Data Traffic
LTE needs to take care of the fact that subscribers are
increasingly using data-oriented services.
Mobile data traffic will grow 30-fold over the next few
years, and 100-fold over the next 10 years.
 Long Term Evolution (LTE)
3GPP technologies have evolved from 2G GSM, to 3G
HSPA, to HSPA+ and now LTE mobile broadband.
The deployments of LTE-A have already started.
LTE-A proposes:
- Carrier aggregation
- Relaying mechanism
- MIMO enhancements
- Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP)
- Device-to-Device Communication
Versions of LTE are often referred to as releases.
For instance, we have LTE rel-8, 9, 10, etc.
 LTE – Cellular Architecture
The cellular architecture that has been used ever since
the introduction of 1G cellular networks has largely
remained unchanged.
LTE also uses the same architecture that allows mobile
devices (User Equipment, UE) to connect to the base
station (evolved Node-B, eNB).
Several eNBs have connections between each other as
well.
LTE eNBs may also be connected to base stations of
other technologies (e.g. 3G, etc).
 LTE – Cellular Architecture
SAE GW: System Architecture
Evolution Gateway
MME: Mobility Management Entity
SGSN: Service GPRS Support Node
HLR: Home Location Register
PCRF: Policy Charging Rules and
Functions
BSC: Base Station Controller
BTS: Base Transceiver Station

ISR G2: Integrated Service Router

Generation 2
EHWIC: Enhanced High-speed WAN
interface cards
RNC: Radio Node Controller
PDN: Packet Data Network

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/global/sk_sk/assets/expo2011/pdfs/Co_mozeme_ockavat_od_LTE_Vladimir_Settey.pdf
 LTE Air Interface and Protocol Stack
Just like the OSI model, LTE has its own protocol stack.
In the user plane, applications generate data that is
handled by transport (and higher) layer protocols, such
as UDP, TCP, etc.
The control plane takes care of the signaling required
between the mobile device and the base station.
LTE uses several different types of logical, transport and
physical channels, which are distinguished by the type
of information they are carrying.

Christopher Cox, “An Introduction to LTE”, John Wiley and Sons, 2012.
Rest of this discussion is based on this work, unless specified otherwise.
 Every layer appends a header with the message from the
source previous layer on the sender side.
message M application
segment Ht M transport
datagram Hn Ht M network
frame Hl Hn Ht M link
physical
link
physical

switch

destination Hn Ht M network
M application Hl Hn H t M link Hn Ht M
Ht M transport physical
Hn Ht M network
Hl Hn Ht M link router
physical
 Protocol Stack

Radio Resource Control

Packet Data Convergence Protocol

Radio Link Control

Medium Access Control

Error (and other) control information

OFDM and SC-FDMA

Converting into analogue

form, filtering etc.
 Channels

Large majority of data and control messages are carried over DL-SCH
and UL-SCH.

PDSCH and PUSCH are only PHY channels that can adapt their modulation
schemes in response to changes in the received SINR.
 Control Information
Downlink control information (from eNB) comprises of:
- power control commands
- scheduling commands, etc.

Uplink control information (to eNB) comprises of:

- HARQ acknowledgements
- Scheduling requests
- Channel Quality Indicators (CQI), etc.
 LTE Addressing
Addressing in ATM uses VCI
and VPI for data delivery.
Can we use the same idea
with LTE?

ATM and IP addresses are specifically designed to suit

hop-by-hop data delivery.
LTE instead assigns slots to user equipments (UE).
UEs are identified using Radio Network Temporary
Identifiers (RNTI).
LTE E-UTRAN Architecture Description, Technical Specification, June 2011 (see Page 12).
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/136400_136499/136401/10.02.00_60/ts_136401v100200p.pdf
 Resource Grid
Information about the resources available at the base
station expressed in frequency and time is often referred
to as the resource grid.
Before discussing the resource grid, slot structure and
frame structure needs to be understood.
The unit of LTE transmission time Ts(=32.6nsec) is the
shortest time of interest to the PHY channel processor.
In our earlier discussion on circuit switching, the
structure was very simple. A bunch of slots comprised of
a frame.
1 slot for 1 2 3 4 N
each user
Frame-1
 Slot Structure
Slot duration is 0.5msec (15,360Ts), which is itself
composed of symbols.
- There can be 6 or 7 symbols per slot.
Normal cyclic prefix: 7 sym/slot, each preceded by 144Ts
(4.7usec) long cyclic prefix. This is more commonly used.
Extended cyclic prefix: 6 sym/slot, each preceded by 512Ts
(16.7usec) cyclic prefix.

These symbols are often

referred to as the
resource elements (RE).
 Cyclic Prefix and Delay Spread
A pulse transmitted over a multipath channel is received
as a train of pulses due to scattering in the environment.
This gives rise to delay spread.
Sent Received

Signal Bandwidth after

bandwidth, B spreading, Bs

Normal cyclic prefix can help the receiver remove inter-

symbol interference with a delay spread of 4.7usec.
This much prefix is enough in most cases.
Unusually large cells may require a larger prefix.
 Frame Structure
Two slots combined together make one sub-frame.
Sub-frame is 30,720Ts (or 1msec) long.
One frame is composed of 10 sub-frames

The given frame structure is used by the LTE network

operating in the FDD mode.
- In FDD mode, there is only one frame structure.
- The frame structures in TDD mode are known as
configurations.
 Multiple Access and Duplexing
The total frequency band F is split into: f1, f2 and f3.
This is FDMA for multiple access.
f1 f3
f1‘
BS
f1‘’
MN MN
1 3
f2
MN
2

Each sub-channel (e.g. f1) is further broken down into

two smaller bands (f1‘ and f1‘’) to allow FDD.
FDD allows two-way communication between node
and the base station.
 Operation of FDD and TDD Modes
fUL: Uplink frequency used by
the node to transmit to the BS.
fDL: Downlink frequency used
by the BS to transmit to the
node.

In FDD, nodes require filters to distinguish

between their transmissions and the
transmissions from the base station.

In TDD, node and the BS know their time slots.

They do not transmit outside their time slots.
 TDD Configurations
Note that configuration 1 might be suitable if data rates are
similar on uplink and downlink (symmetric case).
Configuration 5 may be used in the cells that are dominated by
downlink transmissions.
Cells advertise which TDD configuration is being used.
 RG, RB and RE
Resource grid Resource block

Different number of RBs may be assigned No. of bits supported by each RE depends on
to yield different bandwidth options. the modulation scheme used.
 Bandwidth Options
Resource block can be assigned differently to yield
different bandwidth options.

All these bandwidth options make it easy for network

operators to deploy LTE in a variety of spectrum
management policies.
 Performance Evaluation of LTE
Peak data rates of different releases of LTE and WCDMA
have been observed with the following conditions:
-Each cell is transmitting and receiving in its maximum
bandwidth 20MHz.
-Mobile has powerful UE capabilities that are available in
each release.
-SINR is very high.
-Mobile node is located close to the base station.
-The considered mobile is the only mobile in the cell.
These are of course very optimistic conditions but are
meant to give a picture of best case scenario.
Performance Evaluation of LTE
 LTE-Advanced
LTE-Advanced is actually release 10 of LTE.
Rel-10 eNB is backward compatible with Rel-8 UE.
LTE-A is supposed to use:
Carrier Aggregation, Relaying, MIMO and CoMP
Each one is discussed briefly in the following.

A huge focus has been on improving spectral efficiency.

D2D communication can help here (discussed later).
Communication delay is also expected to reduce.
Delay in switching to and from idle mode must be
small to support power saving operation.

A. Ghosh, R. Ratasuk, B. Mondal, N. Mangalvedhe and T. Thomas, “LTE-Advanced: Next-Generation

Wireless Broadband Technology”, IEEE Wireless Communications, 2010.
 Carrier Aggregation
The main goal of LTE-Advanced is to support a maximum
bandwidth of 100MHz.
Recall that the last bandwidth option of LTE-A was 20MHz.

The problem is that all operators do not have continuous

chunk of 20MHz spectrum.
They may have 10MHz band centered at one carrier
frequency and another 10MHz band centered at
another carrier frequency and so on.
Carrier aggregation allows a mobile to see scattered
spectrum spaces as one continuous band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC_FfAzbhV4 (Carrier Aggregation from 1:10)

 Carrier Aggregation
Broadcom demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress
2013 that two non-contiguous 10MHz bands can be
combined to attain 150Mbps data rates.
The main goal of LTE-A is to allow access to 100MHz
bandwidth. This can be done by combining up to 5
component carriers (CC) each with 20MHz band.

Courtesy: Broadcom
 Types of Carrier Aggregation
Carrier aggregation is classified into three types:
- Inter-band aggregation
- Non-contiguous intra-band aggregation
- Contiguous intra-band aggregation
In inter-band aggregation, component carriers are
located in different frequency bands.
This is most challenging to realize because the mobile
may require different radio components to support
transmission/reception at each band.
 Types of Carrier Aggregation
In non-contiguous intra-band aggregation, CCs are in
the same band.
This simplifies the design.
In contiguous intra-band aggregation, CCs are in the
same band and are also adjacent to each other.

A mobile is supposed to declare CA Bandwidth Class for

each of its supported bands or band combinations.
CA bandwidth class states the no. of CCs a mobile supports.
 Relaying Provisions
A certain node is selected to act as a relay node for a set
of other nodes.
Main reasons for relaying include:
- Increasing coverage area
- Increasing data rates at the cell edges
A relay decodes the received signal, re-encodes and re-
transmits.
Relays achieve higher performance because they do
not amplify noise.
 Relaying Architecture
Relay Node (RN) appears to the mobile as a normal eNB.
It has one or more physical cell IDs of its own; it broadcasts
its own synchronization signals, system information, etc.
RN is controlled by donor eNB (DeNB) on Un interface.
Un interface is a microwave link that is used by RN in
scheduling the mobile nodes.
Evolved Packet Core
 Relaying Node (RN)
RN operates like a mobile node to eNB on Un interface.
It acts like an eNB to other mobile nodes on Uu interface.
It is possible to allocate same frequencies for the Un and
Uu interface.
However, this requires some additional functions on Un
interface (not covered here).
RNs are supposed to be static.
One RN cannot handover to another donor eNB.
Multi-hop relaying is not supported in the specification.
One RN cannot control another RN.
 MIMO: Spatial Diversity
Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) can be used in a
variety of configurations.
One of the most popular ways of using MIMO is to exploit
the spatial diversity.
Same data is transmitted (or received) by two (or more)
antennae at the same frequency.
Intuitively, the data stream should get corrupted.
Advanced DSP techniques and
the fact that these streams take
different paths to destination
improves performance.

Courtesy: Spirent
 MIMO: Beam forming
Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) can be used in a
variety of configurations. We focus on beam forming here.
Conventionally, radio transmission is omnidirectional.
Sectorized antennae in cellular systems transmit over a
particular angular direction (60o or 120o, etc).
This improves system capacity.

More than one antenna can be used to transmit the same

signal such that the transmission in a particular direction
is made to interfere constructively.
This directs the beam in a certain direction.
MIMO beam forming is useful in providing service to the
users at the cell edges.
 MIMO: Beam Forming
Definition: Beam forming uses multiple
antennas to control the direction of
transmission by appropriately
weighting the magnitude and phase of
individual antenna signals.
The figure shows 5 antenna elements
separated by distance d being used in
MIMO beam forming configuration.
The signal from the 2nd antenna travels an
additional dsinӨ distance, which causes
shifts in phases.
The antenna elements are placed such that
they result in constructive interference in
the direction of interest.
 MIMO B/F in LTE
LTE eNB have been shown to support up to 8 layer beam
forming in release-10.
This of course requires 8 antenna elements.

Courtesy: 4G Americas
 CoMP
Co-ordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmission & reception
is an extension of MIMO.
MIMO requires multiple antennae to be installed on the
device. CoMP reuses the available antennae!
eNBs are allowed to communicate with each other (over
the X2 interface specified by 3GPP).
eNBs form their beams such that they do not cause even
small interference to each other.
eNB2 knows that eNB1 is
communicating with UE1. Thus,
it forms a powerful beam to
communicate with UE2 that is
eNB1 eNB2 located at the cell edge.

UE1 UE2