Technologies of Mobile Communication

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is a new technology recently specified by 3GPP-Third Generation Partnership Project on the way towards fourth-generation mobile. This thesis presents the main technical features of this technology as well as its performances in terms of peak bit rate and average cell throughput, among others. LTE entails a big technological improvement as compared with the previous 3G standards. 1 However, this thesis also demonstrates that LTE performances do not fulfill the technical requirements established by ITU-R to classify one radio access technology as a member of the IMT-Advanced family of standards. Thus, this thesis describes the procedure followed by 3GPP to address these challenging requirements. Through the design and optimization of new radio access techniques and a further evolution of the system, 3GPP is laying down the foundations of the future LTE-Advanced standard, the 3GPP candidate for 4G