Amitava Ghosh

LTE-advanced: next-generation wireless broadband technology [Invited Paper]

LTE Release 8 is one of the primary broadband technologies based on OFDM, which is currently being commercialized. LTE Release 8, which is mainly deployed in a macro/microcell layout, provides improved system capacity and coverage, high peak data rates, low latency, reduced operating costs, multi-antenna support, flexible bandwidth operation and seamless integration with existing systems. LTE-Advanced (also known as LTE Release 10) significantly enhances the existing LTE Release 8 and supports much higher peak rates, higher throughput and coverage, and lower latencies, resulting in a better user experience. Additionally, LTE Release 10 will support heterogeneous deployments where low-power nodes comprising picocells, femtocells, relays, remote radio heads, and so on are placed in a macrocell layout. The LTE-Advanced features enable one to meet or exceed IMT-Advanced requirements. It may also be noted that LTE Release 9 provides some minor enhancement to LTE Release 8 with respect to the air interface, and includes features like dual-layer beamforming and time-difference- of-arrival-based location techniques. In this article an overview of the techniques being considered for LTE Release 10 (aka LTEAdvanced) is discussed. This includes bandwidth extension via carrier aggregation to support deployment bandwidths up to 100 MHz, downlink spatial multiplexing including single-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output transmission and coordinated multi point transmission, uplink spatial multiplexing including extension to four-layer MIMO, and heterogeneous networks with emphasis on Type 1 and Type 2 relays. Finally, the performance of LTEAdvanced using IMT-A scenarios is presented and compared against IMT-A targets for full buffer and bursty traffic model.

Mobile WiMAX systems: performance and evolution

Mobile WiMAX was successfully adopted by ITU as one of the IMT-2000 technologies in November 2007. Since then mobile WiMAX (a.k.a. IP-OFDMA) has officially become a major global cellular wireless standard along with 3GPP UMTS/HSPA and 3GPP2 CDMA/ EVDO. Mobile WiMAX is an OFDM-based technology available for deployment today, and new WIMAX devices come to market at much reduced cost than that of current 3G solutions. Currently over 260 service providers are deploying fixed, portable and mobile WiMAX networks in 110 countries. This article provides an overview of the mobile WiMAX system and its performance under various configurations, channel conditions, and types of data traffic. Furthermore, the article provides an overview of mobile WiMAX evolution.

Uplink Control Channel Design for 3GPP LTE

Long term evolution (LTE) of the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access and Radio Access Network is aimed for commercial deployment in 2010. Goals for the evolved system include support for improved system capacity and coverage, high peak data rates, low latency, reduced operating costs, multi-antenna support, flexible bandwidth operations and seamless integration with existing systems. To reach these goals, a new design for the air interface is currently being specified in the 3GPP standards body. The Uplink (UL) for LTE is based on Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access. The UL control channel carries non-data associated control signaling like CQI, ACK/NACK, Scheduling request etc. To maintain the low PA power de-rating, the single carrier property of the UL has to be maintained. As such, special consideration should be given to the UL control channel design. This paper discusses in detail the LTE UL control channel design and its performance.

Uplink Power Control, Interference Coordination and Resource Allocation for 3GPP E-UTRA

Evolved UTRA and UTRAN is being standardized in 3GPP standard group as a long term evolution of the 3GPP radio-access technology. The goal is to achieve 2-4 times the spectral efficiency and user throughput and much smaller latency compared to HSDPA/HSUPA. Single carrier FDMA (e.g. DFT-SOFDM) is the multiple access technique of choice for uplink transmission. Interference control is one of the key elements to achieve the target spectral efficiency and user cell- edge performance requirement, especially for uplink. In this paper, interference mitigation is implemented through slow fractional power control and interference coordination through UE alignment and FDM resource allocation. Simulation results show that these techniques significantly improve uplink sector and cell edge user throughput performance.

IEEE 802.16e system performance: analysis and simulations

In this paper, the performance of a prototypical IEEE 802.16e network is analyzed via link and system simulations. The exponential effective SIR mapping (EESM) is used to map the instantaneous SINR of received signals to a service-specific packet erasure rate (PER), which is in turn used to assess the downlink and uplink network and user data throughput. A variety of data traffic models are considered, including web browsing (HTTP) and full buffer sessions, operating in flat-fading and frequency-selective multipath channels such as the ITU Pedestrian-B model. The downlink network performance of the prototypical IEEE 802.16e network is compared to a 3GPP UMTS high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) system of similar physical dimensions. System simulation results for the prototypical IEEE 802.16e network considered show-when frequency-selective scheduling is not applied-that the IEEE 802.16e downlink has similar throughput performance as HSDPA for a 70/30 TDD DL/UL frame split but approximately 40%-50% higher spectral efficiency, although control channel overhead and uplink capacity limitation remain significant open issues for further study

Random Access Design for UMTS Air-Interface Evolution

Comprehensive long term evolution of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) specifications is currently ongoing to provide significant improvement over the current release. Important goals for the evolved system include significantly improved system capacity and coverage, low latency, reduced operating costs, multi-antenna support, flexible bandwidth operations and seamless integration with existing systems. To ensure low latency, users must be able to establish a connection to the network quickly. This paper provides a preliminary design and procedure for the random access channel used to establish a connection when the mobile is not yet time-synchronized to the network in the uplink.

High speed downlink packet access performance

The overall throughout and delay performance of the 1XTREME proposal in 3GPP2 and the HSDPA proposal in 3GPP are provided. The performance sensitivity to call model, peak data rate, hybrid ARQ, C/I feedback delay, and multipath interference is examined using a quasistatic system simulator. In all cases, performance is bounded using two simple scheduling approaches, maximum C/I and round robin.

Performance of coded higher order modulation and hybrid ARQ for next generation cellular CDMA systems

A key requirement for next generation CDMA systems is to provide a high bit rate packet data service and improved sector throughput for both low and high mobility applications. A 1.25 MHz DS-CDMA evolution called 1XTREME (Third Generation Enhanced Modulation and Encoding) has been proposed. 1XTREME uses a forward shared channel (F-SHCH) that is shared by multiple packet data users and is capable of supporting peak rates of up to 5 Mbps, compared to third generation CDMA system indoor peak data rates of 460 kbps and 2 Mbps for IS-2000 and W-CDMA, respectively. In this paper the link performance of the F-SHCH is evaluated for different modulation and coding scheme (MCS) configurations. Based on the link results, the average sector throughput is presented for two simple scheduling algorithms, as well as performance as a function of the maximum allowed FER operating point.

Coexistence Analysis Involving 3GPP Long Term Evolution

As the standardization of Evolved-UTRA or LTE is ongoing in 3GPP, it is important to ensure the coexistence between two LTE systems or between LTE and legacy UMTS systems sharing the same frequency band. This paper is aimed at presenting a complete view of the status and challenges of the coexistence issue. The high-level methodology, UL power control, and ACLR modeling, etc. are discussed in detail. To ensure coexistence without tightening the RF requirements and hence increasing the cost for LTE, mitigation techniques like interference-aware resource allocation are proposed and shown to be effective by simulation results.

TDD design for UMTS Long-Term Evolution

Long-term evolution (LTE) will provide substantial enhancements to UMTS 3G systems including improved system capacity and coverage, low latency, reduced operating costs, multi-antenna support, flexible bandwidth operations and seamless integration with existing systems. LTE supports both frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) modes to provide deployment flexibility in accordance with operatorpsilas preference and spectrum allocation. This paper presents an overview of LTE TDD design and highlights key differences with FDD. Design challenges unique to TDD are presented together with adopted technical solutions. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate typical TDD system performance with data applications.