A Survey of Long Term Evolution

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a significant project of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), initially proposed on the Toronto conference of 3GPP in 2004 and officially started as LTE work item in 2006. LTE, as a transition from the 3rd generation (3G) to the 4th generation (4G), has achieved great capacity and high speed of mobile telephone networks without doubt. It defines a new packet-only wideband radio with flat architecture and assumes a full Internet Protocol (IP) network architecture in order to assure voice supported in packet domain in design. In addition, it is combined with top-of-the-line radio techniques in order to gain better performance than Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) approaches. LTE provides scalable carrier bandwidths from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz and frequency division duplexing (FDD), as well as time division duplexing (TDD). In this paper, it presents an overall description of LTE technology separately in different aspects of LTE architecture and technical principles to clarify how LTE as a radio technology achieves a high performance for cellular mobile communication systems.