iPhone and BlackBerry are now commonplace, penetration
rates of tablets such as Apple’s iPad are also increasing rapidly. The use of
tablets greatly increases the demand for wireless video applications which puts
tremendous stress on the wireless network (higher resolution expected and thus
higher user rates required over larger coverage areas). This is, consequently,
driving the need for continued innovations in wireless data technologies to
provide more capacity and higher quality of service. 3GPP technologies have
evolved from GSM-EDGE, to UMTS-HSPA-HSPA+, to now initial LTE deployments, to
provide increased capacity and user experience. The next section of this white
paper discusses details of the deployment progress of GSM-EDGE and UMTS-HSPA+,
as well as the recent Rel-8 LTE commercial deployments. The 3GPP evolution will
continue in the coming years with further enhancements to HSPA+ and the introduction
of LTE-Advanced. 3GPP completed the Rel-9 specifications in March of 2010,
which provide further enhancements to the HSPA+ technology and enhancements to
the initial Rel-8 LTE technology.
For HSPA, Rel-9 introduced support for uplink dual-cell,
as well as the capability to enable downlink dualcell deployments across
non-contiguous frequency bands. Also added in Rel-9 was the support of
simultaneous MIMO and DC-HSPA operation, as well as
enhancements to the transmit diversity modes to improve performance with
non-MIMO capable devices. For LTE, several Rel-9 features and capabilities were
added to enhance upon the initial Rel-8 LTE technology. These Rel-9
enhancements included the support of emergency, location and broadcast
services, enhancements to Circuit Switched Fallback (CSFB), enhancements to
MBMS, Self-Organizing Network (SON) enhancements related to load balancing,
Random Access Channel (RACH) optimization and energy savings, the support of
dual layer beamforming, the support of vocoder rate adaptation, architecture
enhancements in support of Home NodeB/eNodeB (i.e. femtocells), enhancements to
IMS Centralized Services and IMS Service Continuity, and UICC enhancements. The
addition of emergency and location services in Rel-9 was critical for meeting
e911 requirements for introducing Voice over LTE (VoLTE), so some of the key
LTE features for optimizing VoLTE coverage and capacity (Semi-Persistent
Scheduling and TTI Bundling) are discussed in the paper presented below in the
slideshare.
