Long Term Evolution of the 3GPP radio technology Part 1

GPP work on the Evolution of the 3G Mobile System started with the RAN Evolution Work Shop, 2 - 3 November 2004 in Toronto, Canada. The Work Shop was open to all interested organizations, members and non members of 3GPP. Operators, manufacturers and research institutes presented more than 40 contributions with views and proposals on the evolution of the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN).

A set of high level requirements was identified in the Work Shop:

* Reduced cost per bit
* Increased service provisioning – more services at lower cost with better user experience
* Flexibility of use of existing and new frequency bands
* Simplified architecture, Open interfaces
* Allow for reasonable terminal power consumption

It was also recommended that the Evolved UTRAN should bring significant improvements to justify the standardization effort and it should avoid unnecessary options. On certain aspects, the collaboration with 3GPP SA WGs was found to be essential: the new split between the Access Network and the Core Network, and the characteristics of the throughput that new services would require demanded close architectural coordination.

With the conclusions of this Work Shop and with broad support from 3GPP members, a feasibility study on the UTRA & UTRAN Long Term Evolution was started in December 2004. The objective was "to develop a framework for the evolution of the 3GPP radio-access technology towards a high-data-rate, low-latency and packet-optimized radio-access technology" The study focused on supporting services provided from the PS-domain, involving:

* Related to the radio-interface physical layer (downlink and uplink):

o e.g. means to support flexible transmission bandwidth up to 20 MHz, introduction of new transmission schemes and advanced multi-antenna technologies

* Related to the radio interface layer 2 and 3:

o e.g. signalling optimization

* Related to the UTRAN architecture:
o identify the optimum UTRAN network architecture and functional split between RAN network nodes

§ RF-related issues