A bit on LTE background

LTE is a standard developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This is a group of telecommunications associations, who initially joined up to standardise the 3G mobile phone system. The following list shows the partners in the 3GPP.

• European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
• Association of Radio Industries and Businesses/Telecommunication Technology Committee (ARIB/TTC)
• China Communications Standards Association
• Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions
• Telecommunications Technology Association.

3GPP 'releases' standards with typical version names "Release X", where X is the version number. Release 99 is the first UMTS specification and was released in 2000. After that, version numbers started at 4, and release 11 is planned for 2012. Release 8 is the first LTE release, but does not comply with the 4G requirements. LTE actually is the little brother of the 4G family. LTE Advanced is the first standard that fulfills the real 4G requirements which set peak speed requirements at 100Mbit/s for high mobility users (in a car or train for instance) and at 1Gbit/s for low mobility users (walking or not moving at all).

LTE might be seen as a stepping stone from 3G (UMTS) techniques, to 4G technologies. LTE advanced is backwards compatible with LTE, it uses the same frequency bands. By treating frequency utilisation of LTE, I immediately do that for the 4th generation standards of the future.

Tip of the iceberg on frequency bands used in LTE.

LTE can be used on many different frequency bands. Worldwide the range of frequency bands include 700, 900, 1800, 1900 and 2600 MHz. Which bands will be used is part of local regulations. In Europe for instance, 900, 1800 and 2600 MHz are planned to be used, while North America will use 700 and 1900 MHz bands.

Within these bands, LTE takes up a certain amount of bandwidth: 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz are specified in the standard. This can be compared to roads for your car, the 1.4 MHz band could be the little country road, where a bandwidth of 20MHz behaves like the multi-lane highway.

3... 2... 1... Takeoff!

This will be my first try at blogging, so bear with me please.

I've never had a topic I wanted to bother other people about on the internet, but now a course in my master has given me the chance. The course is about Regulations and Standards for wireless communications and it is part of the Broadband Telecommunications Technologies Master at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

It will be a blog about the wireless technique LTE (Long Term Evolution) and more specific, about how LTE handles frequency.

Let's start with some history. As noted, LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, and it is a technique for mobile communication. Everybody is familiar with mobile phones, and most probably also with the newer concept, smartphones. These wonders of technology communicate through wireless techniques. GSM and UMTS are examples of such techniques. GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) is a second generation standard for cellular networks. The successor, UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is a third generation technology. Currently under development is the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards, LTE-advanced.

The various generations differ at numerous ways, but main changes can be seen at modulation and frequency utilisation. Hereby I want to explain my interpretation of frequency utilisation with a little example.

When traveling by car, you use roads to go from one place to another. This can be on little country roads which take you home to the place you belong. Or on the highway where Bruce Springsteen is working on. All these roads have in common the rules which apply there. How people use the roads, the way they drive their car from place A to place B, is what I would call road utilisation.

This analogy can be projected on frequency utilisation. Then the roads become the frequency spectrum and the rules to use the roads become the standards in which is organised how the frequency spectrum must be used.

In short, I want to talk about the traffic rules of the new mobile communication network.