LTE-Advanced: The Path towards Gigabit/s in Wireless Mobile Communications

Preben E. Mogensen *1,2, Tommi Koivisto 3, Klaus I. Pedersen 1, Istvn Z. Kovcs 1, Bernhard Raaf 4, Kari Pajukoski 5, Mikko J. Rinne 3
Nokia Siemens Networks, 1 Denmark, 4 Germany, 5 Finland 2 Aalborg University, Denmark 3 Nokia, Finland
*

preben.mogensen@nsn.com

Abstract This paper addresses the performance targets and the technology components being studied by 3GPP for LTEAdvanced. LTE-Advanced is the next major step in the evolution of UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) release 8, currently being finalized by 3GPP. The high level targets of LTE-Advanced are to meet or exceed the IMT-Advanced requirements set by ITU-R and furthermore, meet any additional operator requirements. This for instance includes the target of supporting more than one gigabit/s data rates, higher cell throughput and lower cost per bit. The technology components being identified as part of the LTE-Advanced Study Item include component carrier aggregation to enable up to 100MHz bandwidth, advanced MIMO options up to 8x8 in DL and 4x4 in UL, coordinated multiple point transmission and reception (CoMP), relay nodes (RN) and autonomous component carrier selection (ACCS) for uncoordinated femto cell deployment.

LTE-Advanced is currently in Study Item phase. As detailed in [3] the targets for LTE-Advanced are to meet or exceed the targets defined by ITU-R for IMT-Advanced and additionally meet 3GPP operators requirements for the evolution of E-UTRA (Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access). LTE-Advanced includes extended bandwidth support of up to 100 MHz and offers peak data rates in excess of 1 Gbps in the downlink for low mobility [3]. LTE-Advanced is to be backwards compatible to Rel8 so that both a Rel8 terminal can work in an LTE-Advanced network and an LTEAdvanced terminal can work in a Rel8 network. Optimized support for new IMT bands is also to be provided. II. 3GPP TARGETS FOR LTE-ADVANCED 3GPP has defined a set of performance targets for LTEAdvanced as listed in [3]. In addition to the peak data rate targets, spectral efficiency targets have been defined for different transmit and receive antenna configurations in a 10 MHz system bandwidth as summarized in Table I. Those targets are defined for a homogenous multi-cell macro cellular environment with 3-sector sites, having an inter-site distance of 500 meters, and assuming 10 users per cell. The exact definition of the corresponding simulation environment and assumptions can be found in [4]. Among others, the simulation methodology includes 3-dimensional eNB antenna patterns and down-tilt for optimizing the performance in coherence with practical network deployments. The LTEAdvanced targets are approximately 50% higher than the corresponding performance figures for LTE Rel8 as also listed in Table I.
TABLE I AVERAGE SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY FOR LTE REL8 AND THE CORRESPONDING TARGETS LTE-ADVANCED IN 10 MHZ SYSTEM BANDWIDTH.

I. INTRODUCTION The first release (Rel8) of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is currently being finalized by 3GPP. The physical layer specifications have been highly stable throughout 2008, and the functional finalization of other areas, such as radio protocol specifications, was recognized by the closure of the LTE Rel8 Work Item in December. To ensure long term competitiveness in mobile broadband communication beyond the time frame of HSPA an important design criteria for 3GPP, when initiating the LTE standardization framework back in 2004, were reduced latency, higher user data rates, improved system capacity and coverage, and reduced cost for the operator. LTE (Rel8) supports a new air interface with scalable carrier bandwidths from 1.4MHz to 20 MHz. The multiple access schemes are OFDMA for downlink (DL) and SCFDMA for uplink (UL). LTE Rel8 specifications support peak data rates exceeding 300Mbit/s in DL and more than 75 Mbit/s in UL. LTE also supports very low user plane latency of 10ms and control plane (idle to active mode) latency of less than 100ms. Cell average spectral efficiency and cell-edge performance of LTE Rel8 is significantly improved by a factor of 2-3 compared to HSPA Rel6. The work on the next evolution of LTE, called LTEAdvanced, was triggered by the ITU-R Circular Letter [1] requesting candidate submissions for IMT-Advanced radio interface technologies. The schedule defined by ITU-R calls for a Complete Technology submission for June 2009 and a Final submission for October 2009. Development of radio interface specification recommendations is targeted to be completed in February 2011 [2].

Uplink Downlink

Antenna configuration 1x2 2x4 2x2 4x2 4x4

LTE Rel8 [bps/Hz] 0.8 N.A 1.6 1.7 2.7

LTE-Advanced [bps/Hz] 1.2 2.0 2.4 2.6 3.7

In addition to the macro cell evaluation environment, several other simulation cases also defined in [4] for LTE-Advanced. The latter includes heterogeneous scenarios with a mixture of low power nodes (e.g. relays, or uncoordinated femto or pico

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cells) and planned macro cell sites. As will be discussed later in the paper, local area deployment of low power nodes can be further optimized by introducing new features in LTEAdvanced. III. TECHNOLOGY COMPONENTS A. Overview In order to fulfill the rather challenging targets for LTEAdvanced, several key technology components are being investigated currently in 3GPP as part of the Study Item. First, to meet the peak data rate targets, bandwidth is being extended from the current 20 MHz up to 100 MHz. Second, to enhance both the peak and average spectral efficiencies, MIMO enhancements are being considered for both downlink and uplink: In downlink, LTE-Advanced will support configurations with up to eight transmit antennas at the eNB whereas in uplink, transmissions from four transmit antennas will be supported. These MIMO configurations are targeted to reach peak spectral efficiencies of 30 bps/Hz in downlink and 15 bps/Hz in uplink (using up to 64QAM modulation schemes). In downlink, there is also special emphasis on enhancing the multi-user MIMO schemes over Rel8 in order to allow even better exploitation of spatial multi-user diversity. Due to frequency re-use one, the cell-edge performance of LTE is limited by heavy co-channel (inter-cell) interference. In order to improve this and thereby enhance the cell-edge performance, coordinated transmission and reception techniques (CoMP) are being investigated. In these techniques, the transmission and/or reception is coordinated over multiple cells. Similarly to enhance coverage for high data rate services, support of relays (in-band backhaul) is being studied. Finally, as the deployment of low power eNBs and small cells is expected to significantly increase in the future, several features to optimize such local area scenarios are being considered. These LTE-Advanced technology components are discussed in more detail in the following. B. Bandwidth extension As mentioned, the LTE-Advanced target is to support system bandwidths up to 100 MHz which will allow an increase both in the peak data rate as well as in the system capacity. In the scenarios of interest, the peak data rate increases almost linearly with respect to bandwidth since frequency diversity does typically not any longer bring further performance increase when going beyond 20 MHz. Hence, for example to get the required peak data rate of 1 Gbps in downlink with 30 bps/Hz peak spectral efficiency (assuming 8-layer MIMO transmission), a bandwidth of only 40 MHz is sufficient. It is noted that in addition to an increase in the peak data rate, even more importantly, the bandwidth extension brings higher data rates available to all terminals in a cell, hence increasing also average and cell-edge throughputs. The agreed method to achieve this bandwidth extension in LTE-Advanced is carrier aggregation, in which several LTE Rel8 compatible component carriers are placed adjacent to

each other on the same subcarrier grid such that simple IFFT/FFT operations are allowed. This is illustrated in Figure 1. The scheme is fully backward compliant with Rel8, meaning that any terminal complying with Rel8 specifications will be able to access the LTE-Advanced system using a single component carrier.

Figure 1 Carrier aggregation concept in LTE-Advanced.

In downlink, since OFDMA is utilized as the multiple access method, such carrier aggregation is a simple extension of the FFT sizes from baseband perspective. In uplink however, the LTE Rel8 single-carrier FDMA scheme does not allow as a simple extension of the bandwidth. Hence, it has been agreed that in uplink there is a separate DFT per component carrier prior to the IFFT utilized for transmission [4]. This type of carrier aggregation increases the uplink peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) slightly compared to Rel8, however still the PAPR is kept clearly lower than with OFDMA. Hence, the terminal power consumption increase related to wide bandwidth transmissions is kept to a minimum. In addition to aggregation of contiguous spectrum as depicted in Figure 1, also aggregation of non-contiguous spectrum will be supported by LTE-Advanced. This means that the terminals and eNBs may also support transmission and reception of data on multiple frequency bands simultaneously. This will enable also the operators with sparse spectrum allocations to support wider system bandwidths. C. Improved MIMO schemes Enhanced MIMO schemes are being studied for both the downlink and uplink of LTE-Advanced. In downlink, improved multi-user (MU-) MIMO schemes are studied in order to provide a higher degree of frequency domain scheduling flexibility and enhanced multi-user interference suppression. The studied methods for interference suppression include for example making the terminal aware of the interference caused by the other user(s) sharing the same set of transmission resources as well as improved precoding at the transmitter side. Furthermore, schemes with up to eight eNB transmit antennas are also studied for downlink as compared to a maximum of four transmit antennas supported in LTE Rel8. Support of eight transmit antennas calls for new design considerations in terms of reference symbol patterns, channel state feedback etc. When increasing the number of transmit antennas from four to eight, it is no longer possible to increase the practically achievable diversity order when channel estimation errors are considered [7]. Hence it seems likely that the LTE-Advanced transmit diversity schemes will reuse the space-frequency block code (SFBC) and frequency-switched transmit diversity (FSTD) based schemes known from LTE Rel8. This is done via mapping the eight physical antennas into four virtual

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antennas with a transparent mapping, e.g. CDD. For open-loop spatial multiplexing, it is currently being studied whether new schemes are needed compared to Rel8 since the main focus of LTE-Advanced are low mobility scenarios where closed-loop operation typically implies better performance. Closed-loop spatial multiplexing using eight transmit antennas will be supported, so new feedback signaling support is needed. Also, new reference signal (RS) design is needed to support closed-loop operation. Related to this, it was recently agreed that LTE-Advanced 8 TX operation will be based on division of reference signals into CSI-RS (Channel State Information RS) and demodulation RS, where the CSI-RS are intended for channel state measurements and are sent with a low duty cycle to avoid high overhead [8]. Demodulation RS are user-specific and the overhead scales according to the number of streams transmitted to the user. This kind of operation is feasible given the low mobility assumption as shown in [8]. In addition to transmit diversity, open- and closed-loop MIMO schemes, also enhanced beamforming techniques are studied for LTE-Advanced downlink. In uplink, single user (SU-) MIMO is seen as one of the key techniques providing considerable improvements over LTE Rel8 in cell-edge user throughput as well as in peak and average cell spectral efficiency. As mentioned, up to 4 TX antenna transmission from UE will be specified for LTEAdvanced. It is important that SU-MIMO terminals can have sufficient coverage and throughput in the whole range of radio channel conditions supported by LTE-Advanced; SU-MIMO terminals may rely on open-loop transmit diversity schemes when acquiring channel state information is either impossible or infeasible. Thus good performance of open-loop transmit diversity schemes in diverse radio channel conditions is essential to ensure sufficient coverage and throughput for SUMIMO terminals. One of the key features for the uplink transmit diversity schemes is that the transmission power from all available power amplifiers can be utilized when needed. Closed-loop (CL) transmit diversity, that is, single-stream precoding with a precoding vector indication decided by eNB is an attractive scheme for data channel transmission of LTEAdvanced SU-MIMO terminals with multiple transmit antennas and power amplifiers. Closed-loop transmit diversity is expected to improve average user throughput and, in particular, user throughput at the cell edge. In [17], CL transmit diversity is shown to outperform open-loop transmit diversity in low mobility conditions where arrangement for sufficient uplink channel sounding and sufficiently fast feedback is feasible. Multi-stream spatial multiplexing is expected to improve average user throughput and UL peak data rate. Similarly to single-stream transmission, multi-stream spatial multiplexing schemes involve various inter-related designs for precoding matrices, reference signals, HARQ processes, layer mapping, and control signals. However, one main division is between non-precoded and precoded schemes. Relatively moderate

gains from precoding in full-rank transmission are expected, and full-rank is the normal case in uplink multi-stream transmission. Thus, non-precoded spatial multiplexing should be the baseline option. Baseline option should also have separately encoded layers to facilitate efficient use of advanced receivers at the eNodeB. Nevertheless, precoded multi-stream transmission should be investigated further. Especially, for TDD system, non-codebook based precoding schemes need to be studied further, taking realistic assumptions on impairments such as inaccuracy on channel reciprocity into account. The exact specifications and system requirements for all MIMO improvements are still under discussion in 3GPP as part of the Study Item phase. D. Coordinated Transmission and Reception schemes With the OFDMA and SC-FDMA technologies employed in the LTE Rel8 a major performance limiting factor is due to the inter-cell interference while the intra-cell interference is very low (ideally zero). Several uplink and downlink interference cancellation techniques have been proposed in the research literature, disclosing the theoretical potential for significant system performance gains [9]-[11]. For the LTEAdvanced Study Item, the concepts of base station coordinated scheduling and/or beamforming, and joint transmission are currently an integral part of the systems specifications, under the generic name of cooperative multipoint transmission (CoMP) [4]. The main target of these solutions is a significant boost of the system performance, while keeping the system complexity increase to a minimum. The exact downlink specifications and system requirements both for eNodeB and UE are still under discussion in 3GPP as part of the Study Item phase [13]-[16]. For uplink the implementation of CoMP reception schemes requires less or no standardization and they are more vendor-specific solutions [4]. Distributed and centralized solutions are possible for these CoMP schemes, each with certain advantages and disadvantages from system deployment point of view. Figure 2 shows an example of downlink CoMP with joint processing/transmission from 3 cells. Both cases of MUMIMO (UE#1A, UE#1B, UE#1C) and SU-MIMO (UE#2A) data transmissions are depicted with corresponding time/frequency resource allocation. In both, SU and MU transmission cases the inter-cell interference at the UEs is actively mitigated due to the joint processing in the three transmitting cells. The second 3GPP CoMP alternative, the coordinated scheduling and/or beamforming scheme, implies coordinated data transmission to a single UE from one transmission point only in the allocated time/frequency resources [4]. In both these 3GPP CoMP schemes, the scheduling and downlink control information is sent from a single cell only, the anchor cell for a given UE. Depending on the network configuration, the uplink control signaling from the UEs can be received by multiple cells, although the scheduling/ processing still takes place only in the anchor cell.

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Cell C

UE#1B

Cell B Network

Backhaul link

Access link

RN
UE#1C UE#1A UE#2A

eNB

UE

UE

Legend
MU UE#1A MU UE#1B MU UE#1C SU UE#2A DL/UL Signaling

Figure 3 Relay Node deployment.

Cell A

Figure 2 Example of downlink CoMP with joint processing/transmission scheme for 3 collaborating cells.

The main challenges in the practical implementation of downlink CoMP transmission schemes are related to: Downlink (common/dedicated) reference signal design and multi-cell channel estimation support with minimal impact on the downlink signaling overhead, Definition of terminal CSI feedback and required reporting schemes with minimal impact on the uplink signaling overhead, and Definition, configuration and coordination of the cooperative cell clusters, from the network side, and of the cooperative active sets, from the UE side, Hence despite of the high theoretical performance gain of cooperative/collaborative transmission schemes, the practical performance versus complexity of various 3GPP CoMP solutions are yet to be evaluated. E. Relay Nodes The envisaged high bandwidth for LTE-Advanced may reduce the available spectral power density, and furthermore wide spectrum is only available at higher frequency bands implying higher attenuation. Subscribers requesting high data rate services are often located indoor and suffering from low signal strength as radio waves have to penetrate through the building walls. To combat these effects and provide high throughput consistently throughout the network, transmitting nodes need to be placed closer to the users to achieve very high user data rates. Apart from Femto cells, which will be presented in section F., relay nodes (RNs) provide an attractive, simple to install and cost-efficient solution for dense cell deployments, as no (wired) backhaul is required [18],[19]. High throughputs can be achieved on the radio access link due to the proximity of the RN and its smaller coverage area. The backhaul link from the RN to the eNB also profits from a typically better RN position than the served UE, and so allows the eNB via the RN to provide better coverage and operate at higher spectral efficiency.

Basically, a RN is expected to behave similarly to an ordinary eNB from the terminal point of view, including scheduling and Radio Resource Management [20], but the backhaul link is realized by a LTE link to a nearby eNB, using either an additional frequency band (outband) or the same (inband) as for the access link (Figure 3). The latter approach is universally deployable as it does not require additional frequency licenses and avoids extensive isolation against selfinterference by using a TDMA separation between RN transmission to terminals and reception from eNB: A simple solution to the TDMA separation is that the RN reserves some MBSFN subframes (Multi-Media Broadcast over a Single Frequency Network). The MBSFN subframe allows discontinuing all downlink transmission from an eNB. It was originally introduced to support joint single frequency broadcast operation from several eNBs, but now also serves to hide the backhaul link from Rel8 terminals allowing fully backward compatible RN operation [21]. F. Local area optimization features Local area deployment of low power eNBs such as femto cells calls for new features to facilitate high performance of uncoordinated installations. As an example, let us consider to scenario depicted in Figure 4 with an indoor scenario consisting of four apartments (illustrated with different colors). A low power eNB is placed in each apartment without any prior network planning, also known as uncoordinated deployment. As opposed to planned macro cell networks, plain frequency re-use one is typically not found to be the optimal configuration for such scenarios - especially considering closed subscriber groups (CSG) for the individual low power eNBs. The optimal frequency configuration varies significantly from scenario to scenario, depending also on the offered traffic, etc.

20 m

20 m

Figure 4 Local area scenario with four low power eNBs in a building with four apartments.

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In order to have support for high performing uncoordinated local area deployment, it has been proposed to have autonomous component carrier selection (ACCS) considered for LTE-Advanced. Autonomous component carrier selection is a fully distributed scheme, where each eNB dynamically selects a number of component carriers for its use. The selection by each eNB is dynamic according to the offered traffic in the cell, as well as based on how selection of component carriers impacts the performance in the immediately surrounding cells. This essentially means that the autonomous component carrier selection scheme provides an automatic mechanism for a dynamic frequency re-use on a component carrier resolution. The feature could also be used for managing the interference between local area and macro cells in heterogeneous environments. The basic concept is further illustrated in Figure 5 with a simple example. Here each eNB has selected at least one primary component carrier (marked with P), and potentially multiple secondary component carriers (marked with S) depending on the offered traffic, interference conditions, etc. As a new eNB is powered on (eNB #5) it senses the environment and acquires information from the existing eNBs on which component carriers they have selected. Inter eNB communication could be realized via inband over-the-air signaling for cases without X2. Based on the later information, the new eNB selects one primary component carrier, and starts carrying traffic in its cell. As the offered traffic increases, eNB #5 may select additional secondary component carriers [22].
New eNB #5 is switched on
P

challenge of such higher order MIMO is low control channel overhead, which is feasible at low mobile speed. Component carrier aggregation supports Rel8 backward compatible bandwidth extension of up to 100MHz thus the theoretical peak data rate of LTE-Advanced may be even up to 3Gbit/s. Other features of CoMP, relay nodes (RN) and autonomous component carrier selection are also studied to further boost the cell average spectral efficiency and cell edge performance of LTE-Advanced. REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] ITU-R Circular Letter 5/LCCE/2 issued on March 7th 2008 ITU-R IMT-ADV/2(Rev.1) Submission and evaluation process and consensus building 3GPP Technical Report 36.913 Requirements for further advancements for E-UTRA (LTE-Advanced), June 2008. 3GPP Technical Report 36.814, Further Advancements of E-UTRA Physical Layer Aspects, Version 0.4.0, February 2009. S. Parkvall, et al., LTE-Advanced Evolving LTE Towards IMT-Advanced, in IEEE Proc. Vehicular Technology Conference, Sept. 2008. ITU, Guidelines for evaluation of radio interface technologies for IMTAdvanced, Technical report, July 2008. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090729, Four- vs. eight antenna port transmit diversity for LTE-Advanced, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Meeting #56, Athens, Greece, 9-13 February 2009. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090728, Further considerations on DL reference symbols for LTE-Advanced, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Meeting #56, Athens, Greece, 9-13 February 2009. O. Somekh, et. al, Distributed Multi-Cell Zero-Forcing Beamforming in Cellular Downlink Channels, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2006.. T. Weber et al., Decentralized Interference Cancellation in Mobile Radio Networks, IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) , 2007. Y. Hadisusanto, et al., Distributed Base Station Cooperation via BlockDiagonalization and Dual-Decomposition, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2008. A. Tolli, et al., Cooperative MIMO-OFDM Cellular System with Soft Handover between Distributed Base Station Antennas, IEEE Trans. On Wireless Comm., Vol 7, No. 4, April 2008. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090914 Downlink CoMP, Meeting #56, Athens, Greece, 9 13 February, 2009. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090725 Setup of CoMP cooperation areas, Meeting #56, Athens, Greece, 9 13 February, 2009. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090529 Way forward on CoMP and MIMO DL RS - Outcome of ad hoc discussions, Meeting #55b, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 12 - 16 January, 2009. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-091064 Way forward of CoMP Clustering & Active Set, Meeting #56, Athens, Greece, 9 13 February, 2009. 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090276, Single-stream precoding for LTEAdvanced UL, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Meeting #56, Athens, Greece, 9 13 February, 2009 T. Beniero, et al., Effect of Relaying on Coverage in 3GPP LTEAdvanced, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conf. Spring, April 2009 E. Lang, et al., Business Impact of Relay Deployment for Coverage Extension in 3GPP LTE-Advanced, to appear in International Workshop on LTE Evolution @ ICC 2009, June 2009, Dresden, Germany O. Teyeb, et al., Handover Framework for Relay Enhanced LTE Networks to appear in International Workshop on LTE Evolution @ ICC 2009, June 2009, Dresden, Germany 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-084325, Backward compatible implementation of Relaying, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Meeting #55, Prague, Czech Republic, 10 14 November, 2008 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1, R1-090735, Primary Component Carrier Selection, Monitoring, and Recovery, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, February 2009.

eNB #1
P S

eNB #4

S S S

P S P

eNB #2 eNB #3

[16] [17] [18]

S S

Figure 5 Basic principle of autonomous component carrier selection

[19] [20] [21] [22]

IV. CONCLUSION In this paper we have listed the main technology components for LTE-Advanced, currently being studied by 3GPP in order to fulfill or exceed the IMT-Advanced requirements set by ITU-R and meet the additional operator requirements. LTEAdvanced will facilitate up to 8 spatial MIMO streams in DL and up to 4 in UL. The corresponding peak spectral efficiency is 30bit/s/Hz and 15bit/s/Hz respectively. The major design

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