You are on page 1of 16

Nokia Networks

LTE Release 12 and Beyond

Page 1

Nokia Networks white paper


LTE Release 12 and Beyond

CONTENTS
1.Introduction

2.Technology enablers coming with Release 12

2.1 Small Cell enhancements


2.2 Carrier Aggregation enhancements
2.3 Macro Cell enhancements
2.4 Machine-Type Communications (MTC)
2.5 3GPP-WLAN radio level interworking
2.6 LTE Unlicensed
2.7Network Assisted Interference
Cancellation and Suppression (NAICS)
2.8 Further enhancements

4
6
7
8
9
10
11
11

3.Summary

13

4. Further reading

15

Page 2

nsn.com

1.Introduction
In 2014 the speed of LTE networks is evolving from 150 Mbps to 300
Mbps, using LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation. A further evolution to
450 Mbps has been demonstrated by Nokia Networks at Mobile World
Congress 2014. With the upcoming 3GPP releases from Release12
onwards, we will see many more enhancements to the LTE and TD-LTE
technology. This whitepaper aims to provide a concise overview.
The continuing demand for ever more capacity is driven largely by
growing use of video. As outlined by Nokia Networks in its Vision 2020,
a 1,000 fold increase in network capacity requires increases in all
dimensions efficiency, spectrum and density.

MIMO &
adv. receiver

Carrier
Aggregation

Advanced
macros

Smart
Scheduler

New bands

HetNet
management

eCoMP

ASA

Flexible
small cells

As people from all walks of life start to use media more intensively,
another issue is their continually rising expectations of throughput
and service - by 2020, a typical user will consume 1 Gbyte of data
per day. Operators also need to secure their share of the mobile
broadband market by improving the efficiency of their operations
and the robustness of their networks robustness, developing new
business opportunities, extending their spectrum and by protecting
their investment.
LTE 3GPP Release 12 and beyond will provide a foundation to meets
these challenging demands, as well as smooth the way towards the
4G / 5G era.

Page 3

nsn.com

2.Technology enablers coming with


Release 12
Enhancements in 3GPP Release 12 focus on the four areas of Capacity,
Coverage, Coordination (between cells) and Cost. Improvements
in these areas are achieved by several technology enablers: small
cell enhancements, macro cell enhancements and Machine-Type
Communications (MTC). These enablers are described in this paper.
Customer experience, capacity and coverage will be improved with
small cell enhancements, based on inter-site Carrier Aggregation,
LTE-WLAN integration and macro cell enhancements. Small cell
enhancements are also known as enhanced local access. Improvements
in capacity and a more robust network performance are achieved by 3D
Beam forming/MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output), advanced user
terminals and evolved Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) techniques, as
well as through Self-Organizing Networks for small cell deployments.
New spectrum footprint and new business opportunities will be
achieved by optimizing the system for MTC, as well as by, for example,
using LTE for Public Safety.

Capacity

Coverage

Small cell
enhancements
Macro cell
enhancements

1000x capacity
increase

1 GB per day per


user everywhere

Carrier Aggregation
enhancements

Coordination

Cost

Machine-Type
Communications
SON, WLAN integration,
public safety

Eciency and
robustness

New business, new


spectrum footprint

Figure 1: The Focus (a.k.a. The Four Cs), the Enablers, the Benefits

2.1 Small Cell enhancements


Increasing traffic load will require more cells and more capacity.
Enhancements to Release 12 help small cell deployments in two main
areas - reducing mobility signaling in high density cell deployments
and improving user data rates by using macro cells and small cells
together.

Page 4

nsn.com

The high number of small cells will increase signaling traffic in the core
network as users move frequently from one small cell to another. This
situation will be improved by separating the user plane and control
plane functions in the Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture. This
method lets the macro layer manage the mobility while offloading high
data traffic to the small cells.
Dual connectivity also known as Inter-site carrier aggregation, is used
to achieve carrier aggregation between sites. This is an attractive
solution for Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) with no ideal backhaul
network. Dual connectivity allows mobility management to be
maintained on the macro layer while aggregating small cells to provide
extra user plane capacity, increasing the throughput. Inter-site carrier
aggregation is one of Nokia Networks innovations in the small cell
area. The concept optimizes performance by combining the benefits
of macro cell coverage and small cell capacity. Based on increasing the
bandwidth through carrier aggregation, inter-site carrier aggregation
can provide a cell edge gain of 50%, even in loaded networks.
Figure 2 describes how Dual Connectivity is achieved. The radio
protocols of the user plane are split between the Master eNB (MeNB,
typically a macro cell) and the Secondary eNB (SeNB, typically a small
cell). This gives more flexibility to radio bearers carrying user data.
They can either use resources of the macro cell only (depicted in grey),
of the small cell only (depicted in cyan) or aggregate both (depicted
in blue), depending on whether coverage, offload or throughput is to
be favored.
In addition to enhancements for the higher layer, Release 12 also
improves physical layer capabilities for small cells. The introduction
of 256 QAM in the downlink enhances the spectrum efficiency
for terminals experiencing favorable channel conditions. Another
improvement area is enhanced small cell discovery, which reduces
transition time for dormant cell on/off. This enables further energy
savings and reduces Cell-Specific Reference Signals (CRS) interference
under varying traffic load.

S1

S1

PDCP

PDCP

RLC

RLC

X2

PDCP
RLC

RLC

MAC

MAC

MeNB

SeNB

Figure 2: Dual connectivity


Page 5

nsn.com

TDD

FDD

Figure 3. FDD/TDD aggregation

2.2 Carrier Aggregation enhancements


The enhanced carrier aggregation capabilities in Release 12 will
enable the use of FDD/TDD carrier aggregation. Release 10 allows
aggregation of either FDD or TDD carriers for intra or inter-band
cases. However, Release 12 will also enable the aggregation of
co-located FDD and TDD carriers to a single terminal, as shown in
Figure 3. As part of the small cell enhancements, the aggregation will
be further extended to support aggregation between sites, enabling
inter-site carrier aggregation between macro and small cell sites.
Work on RF and performance requirements also supports downlink
carrier aggregation with three downlink carriers, with up to 60 MHz of
total spectrum being aggregated. This will support data rates of up to
450 Mbps, as illustrated in Figure 4.
The use of non-backwards compatible New Carrier Type (NCT) was
also considered as part of the Release 12 work but it was concluded
that the small gains achievable did not justify the resulting market
fragmentation.

Higher peak data rate


20 MHz

150 Mbps

20 MHz

150 Mbps

20 MHz

150 Mbps

450 Mbps

Figure 4. Aggregating 3 downlink carriers with carrier aggregation.

Page 6

nsn.com

2.3 Macro Cell enhancements


With exponential growth in network traffic, future networks need
to continue to evolve their use of macro and small cells. There are
opportunities to enhance the network capacity and coverage of current
LTE macro cell deployments significantly by exploiting multi-antennas,
advanced receivers, network architectures and new spectrum.
Macro cell enhancements are attractive because they allow further
exploitation of existing base station sites and transport infrastructure.
Base stations such as Nokia Networks Flexi Multiradio 10 range can be
used to build high capacity macro cells with the potential to double
the spectral efficiency of existing LTE macro networks. The aim is to
support LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies in the 700-2600 MHz
bands, achieve tight coordination with small cells, for example in the
3.5 GHz band, and combine the following features:
Large number of transmit and receive antennas: more than four
transmit and receive antennas
Active Antenna Systems (AAS) where antenna and RF are built
together
AAS with vertical sectorization and user specific elevation
beamforming/3-D MIMO
Advanced uplink receivers
Enhanced Cooperative Multipoint Transmission and Reception
(eCoMP)
Advanced radio network architecture including on-site resource
pooling
High capacity backhaul
Authorized Shared Access (ASA) to gain access to more IMT
spectrum
By increasing the number of transmit and receive antennas at the
base stations from two to four and then to eight, a significant
gain in network capacity can be achieved. This gain can be further
enhanced by using advanced receiver and single-user and multi-user
MIMO schemes (SU/MU MIMO) based on dedicated demodulation
reference signals.
Using active antennas where the RF components are integrated into
the antenna and performing vertical sectorization or sector specific
elevation beamforming (using two fixed beams per sector) can give
significant improvements in sector capacity compared to a single
beam system. Building upon vertical sectorization, Release 12 will be
developing two techniques namely:
a)UE-specific elevation beamforming that adds UE specific vertical
beamsteering to existing azimuth-only closed loop SU/MU MIMO
methods
Page 7

nsn.com

UE-specic elevation
beamforming/3D-MIMO

Figure 5: UE-specific 3D-MIMO


b)3D-MIMO techniques that simultaneously exploit both azimuth
and elevation of the multipath channel to suit each user. These
techniques are expected to give significant improvements in both
the cell edge and sector capacity.
The concept of 3D-MIMO is illustrated in Figure 5.
Next in line for deployment are centralized solutions such as cluster
level on-site resource pooling using high capacity and low latency
fiber backhaul (Centralized RAN), where a baseband pool serves the
macro site and underlay remote radio heads. Such a radio network
architecture can also further improve radio performance.
Following the study of centralized scheduling with non-ideal backhaul,
work is also being done on the enhanced CoMP. This has focused
on the scenario where benefits were identified, namely between a
macro and small cell in which the macro cell is used to coordinate the
scheduler for small cells in the same coverage area.
Last but not least, networks evolve by exploiting Authorized Shared
Access / Licensed Shared Access, a new and complementary way of
authorizing spectrum use in addition to exclusive licensed spectrum. This
leads to higher spectrum availability and a predictable QoS in the shared
spectrum, increasing the number of subscribers and network capacity.

2.4 Machine-Type Communications (MTC)


The number of embedded machine-to-machine modems is expected
to increase substantially. While a typical urban area today can have
5,000-10,000 subscribers per base station, the growth of machineto-machine traffic could see up to 100,000 connected devices per
base station, setting new requirements for the mobile network.
Page 8

nsn.com

In addition to the already specified MTC support in 3GPP, the following


areas of optimization are expected to be covered in Release 12:
Network load optimization will continue: MTC-specific signaling
and connectivity optimization ensure that a very large number of
connected devices can be supported by the LTE radio, with small
amounts of data amount delivered efficiently.
The low cost MTC device studies are complete. Based on these,
3GPP is defining a new terminal category cost optimized for MTC.
3GPP studies show that for the RF part, significant savings can be
achieved with the terminal using only a single receive antenna and
half-duplex operation. On the baseband side, significant savings can
be achieved from a single receive antenna, reduced bandwidth and
a lower peak data rate. The studies indicate that combining these
measures can achieve a modem cost saving of approximately 60%.
Some MTC terminals are installed in the extreme coverage scenario
and might have characteristics such as very low data rate and greater
tolerance to delays. Release 13 solutions are expected to provide
an improvement in LTE coverage equivalent to 15 dB for FDD for
terminals operating delay-tolerant MTC applications. This is achieved
by techniques such as further repetition, power boosting and
simplification of control channel functions.

2.5 3GPP-WLAN radio level interworking


3GPP has made a RAN level study on ways to enhance radio level
3GPP-WLAN interworking.
Current ANDSF based methods for access network selection and
traffic routing do not consider either RAN network conditions or
factors such as WLAN load. The mere presence of a WLAN network
allowed by ANDSF rules along with an acceptable radio signal strength
is used to divert traffic from a 3GPP RAN network to a WLAN network.
RAN level assistance for 3GPP-WLAN interworking is designed for
occasions where typical WLAN selections cannot achieve adequate
load balancing between cellular and WLAN, for instance, where legacy
device behavior is not sufficient. The reason for load balancing or
traffic steering may be due to a changing load situation in both WLAN
and 3GPP radio access networks. With todays solutions, load is not
considered as part of the WLAN selection process. The intention of
load balancing is to use the eNB initiative to steer terminal traffic onto
either the operator controlled WLAN or the RAN, depending on the
need. Only RAN has a comprehensive overview of its load situations
and resource allocation strategies.
Release 12 specifies a mechanism for 3GPP/WLAN access network
selection and traffic steering. The solution supports deployments
both with and without ANDSF and the co-existence of ANDSF with RAN
rules when both are deployed.
Page 9

nsn.com

In the defined mechanism, the RAN assistance parameters are


transferred via system broadcast and/or dedicated signaling. In a
network without enhanced ANDSF deployment or with terminals
without ANDSF support, these RAN assistance parameters are used
within RAN rules defined under RAN WG specifications. In networks
that support ANDSF and which have terminals capable of ANDSF, the
RAN assistance parameters are used as part of the ANDSF policies.

2.6 LTE Unlicensed


A new study area emerging in 3GPP is the use of LTE for unlicensed
spectrum, with the Licensed Assisted Access (LAA). Such a solution
would complement LTE operation, especially in public hotspots or
enterprises, as shown in Figure 6. This would allow the operator to
benefit from the local extra capacity from the unlicensed spectrum
without having to use other technologies with special interworking and
admission control arrangements. The solutions are not expected to
be standalone but always used with aggregation to the licensed band
LTE operation.

Public indoor cells

Home cells to rely


on Wi-Fi (or femto)

Outdoor hot spot


Coordinated with macro/micro cells

Figure 6. LAA application environment.

Page 10

nsn.com

2.7Network Assisted Interference


Cancellation and Suppression (NAICS)
Co-channel interference is the major limitation to achieving higher
capacity in cellular networks. In addition to various interference
coordination schemes, interference aware receivers attempting to
mitigate co-channel interference have shown promising performance
gains compared to receivers considering co-channel interference
as AWGN.
In Release 11, specifying terminal performance requirements in
interference rejection combining (IRC) receivers was the first step
towards increasing the role of the receiver in the system design.
The first steps have also been taken with non-linear interference
cancellation receivers. Release 11 specified terminal performance
requirements for Cell-Specific Reference Signals (CRS). This focused
on how they mitigate interference for heterogeneous deployments
where co-channel interference from CRS dominates but is negligible
from data, assuming that data resource element muting is in use.
Release 12 enhancements to intra-cell and inter-cell interference
mitigation at the receiver side (NAICS) are achieved by increasing the
degree of knowledge about interfering transmissions with possible
assistance in the network. Network assistance enables the use of a
more advanced receiver (including non-linear receivers) and improves
performance compared to Release 11 IRC that does not require
transmission assistance in the network.
A specific intra-cell interference scenario part of Release 12
studies is SU-MIMO. Applying advanced receivers to mitigate interstream interference with SU-MIMO can be done without additional
network assistance. It is enough to just define new UE performance
requirements for this scenario.

2.8 Further enhancements


Self Organizing Networks (SON) will play a key role in the efficient
operation of dense small cells. Mass deployments will introduce
new requirements in SON functions to ensure proper cell identity
management and neighbor cell relations, as well as to enhance
mobility robustness and load balancing in small cell coverage gaps.
Additionally, intelligent solutions to easily switch small cell capacity
layers to a power saving mode will be essential.

Page 11

nsn.com

LTE is also attracting the attention of public safety organizations and


authorities, as a strong candidate to enhance their communications.
LTE will be optimized to meet service requirements set by missioncritical group communications, including fast and efficient set-up of
a low-delay communication path connecting any number of users
possibly co-located, and uncompromised robustness, combined with
the mobility of todays 3GPP systems.
Further enhancements to LTE TDD for uplink-downlink interference
management and traffic adaptation (eIMTA) enable dynamic uplinkdownlink reconfiguration according to instantaneous traffic statistics
while maintaining backwards compatibility. The eIMTA feature to
improve TDD capabilities in Release 12 can provide significant
performance benefits in a small cells environment.
Furthermore, 3GPP will look for new opportunities to enhance LTEHSPA integration and LTE-WLAN interworking, as well as enabling
device-to-device discovery and communication for commercial and
public safety use.

Page 12

nsn.com

3.Summary
LTE development continues strongly in Release 12 and beyond
by enhancing LTE and LTE-Advanced. In particular, LTE Release
12 addresses coordinated small cell deployments, macro cell
enhancements, discovery in device-to-device communication,
enhanced SON, flexible deployment and improved interference
management in HetNets.
Release 12 features aim to boost performance and enter new
areas and spectrum. The following two tables summarize the most
promising Release 12 features:

Benefits from 3GPP Release 12 Boost Performance


Rel12 Feature

Benefit

Small Cell Enhancement based on


Inter-site CA

Optimized small cell mobility by reducing RAN to CN signaling


Improved data rates by using macro and small cells together
More flexible TDD spectrum use

UE-specific elevation beamforming/


3D-MIMO

Significantly enhanced macro cell capacity and coverage

Advanced receivers

Removing interference to increase UL and DL capacity

Enhanced Coordinated Multi-Point


(eCoMP)

Enhance coverage by exploiting coordination in case of non-ideal


backhaul

Enhanced SON

Efficient operation of dense small cell deployments


Energy savings in small cell capacity layers

Benefits from 3GPP Release 12 Expand to New Areas and New Spectrum
Rel12 Feature

Benefit

LTE-WLAN integration

10 Mbps minimum DL data rate


1000x hot spot capacity in present decade

LTE-HSPA integration

Enhanced multi-technology support

Machine-Type Communication (MTC)

Get prepared for 50 Bn connected devices or 100.000 devices per cell

Public safety

Secure operators market share by expanding LTE footprint

Page 13

nsn.com

Nokia Networks is a leading contributor in 3GPP, driving LTE and


LTE-Advanced standards. It is also shaping 5G through various
activities, including participation in the EU FP7 collaborative project
METIS and is contributing to ITU-R IMT vision work.

2020+
2015+
2013+
2010+

5G

LTE Advanced Evolution


Rel-12 and Rel-13

LTE Advanced
Rel-10 and Rel-11

LTE
Rel-8 and Rel-9

Figure 7: The radio evolution in the present decade

Page 14

nsn.com

4. Further reading
Nokia Technology Vision
LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum: European Regulation and Co-existence
Considerations, Nokia 3GPP presentation

Page 15

nsn.com

Public
Nokia is a registered trademark of Nokia Corporation. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks or trade names of their
respective owners.
Nokia
Nokia Solutions and Networks Oy
P.O. Box 1
FI-02022
Finland
Visiting address:
Karaportti 3,
ESPOO,
Finland
Switchboard +358 71 400 4000
Product code C401-01005-WP-201406-1-EN
Nokia Solutions and Networks 2014

nsn.com

You might also like