The driving force to further develop LTE towards LTE–Advanced, LTE R-10 is to provide higher bitrates in a cost efficient way, and at the same time completely fulfil the requirements set by ITU for IMT Advanced, also referred to as 4G.
In LTE-Advanced focus is on higher capacity:
- increased peak data rate, DL 3 Gbps, UL 1.5 Gbps
- higher spectral efficiency, from a maximum of 16bps/Hz in R8 to 30 bps/Hz in R10
- increased number of simultaneously active subscribers
- improved performance at cell edges, e.g. for DL 2x2 MIMO at least 2.40 bps/Hz/cell.
The main new functionalities introduced in LTE-Advanced are Carrier Aggregation (CA), enhanced use of multi-antenna techniques and support for Relay Nodes (RN).