Authors: Debjani De, Architect, and Ravi Raj Bhat, Director of Engineering
In today’s ever-shrinking mobile and global village, information on the go is becoming as mundane as a four-square meal. While Generation X grew up with broadband Internet and the mobile access revolution, Gen Y is having a ball with ready connectivity to media-rich content and the social networking revolution. Today’s new consumers want anytime, anywhere access, and this helps drive ever-growing demand for new and innovative applications that capitalize on the triple play of simultaneous voice, video, and data sessions with differentiated Quality of Service (QoS).
Under the constant pressure of dwindling voice revenues and ever-increasing competition for market-share from new entrants in a deregulated market, operators are increasingly offering bundled “all-you-can-savor” services to win over new customers, retain existing ones, and increase overall Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). In turn, these service innovations are driving up traffic both in the access domain as well as in the core network, spurring demand for unwired and mobile access to tens of megabits per second of data traffic.
While Third Generation (3G) wireless technologies under the banner of the International Mobile Telecommunication-2000 (IMT-2000) initiative of ITU promised access up to 133Mbps bandwidth, unfortunately both mainstream options – Code Division Multiple Access 2000 (CDMA2000) and Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) – have failed to deliver on that objective. Industry-wide collaborative projects focused on technology standards – Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for WCDMA and 3GPP2 for CDMA2000 – have put forth evolutionary solutions to meet the early promise of IMT-2000 and the growing demand for wireless bandwidth.
3GPP2 started out with CDMA2000 1X (released in 1999), then followed up with Evolution Data-Optimized (1xEV-DO in 2000), EV-DO Rev.A (with VoIP support in 2004), EV-DO Rev.B (with multi-carrier support in 2006), and finally Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB, formerly known as EV-DO Rev.C) in 2007. Similarly, 3GPP started out with Release-99 using WCDMA and followed up with Release-5 supporting High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) in 2002, Release-6 supporting High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) in 2005, and Release-7 in 2007 culminating at 14Mbps peak bandwidth.
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is 3GPP’s latest initiative, standardized in the form of Release-8 and targeted for completion by early 2009. LTE promises to get us to 100Mbps downlink (DL) speed and 50Mbps Uplink (UL) speed with 20MHz bandwidth. Fortunately, operators worldwide appear to be embracing LTE, and service providers and infrastructure vendors alike are gearing up for the next phase of telecom advancement. This paper is a primer on the technical aspects of LTE and illustrates various key features of this exciting new technology.
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