The 3GPP Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) system, as compared to the LTE system, is anticipated to include several new features and enhancements, such as the usage of channel bandwidth beyond 20 MHz (up 100 MHz), higher order multiple input multiple output (MIMO) for both downlink and uplink transmissions, larger capacity especially for cell edge user equipment, and voice over IP (VoIP) users, and wider coverage and etc. This paper presents some key enabling technologies including flexible uplink access schemes, advanced uplink MIMO receiver designs, cell search, adaptive hybrid ARQ, and multi-resolution MIMO precoding, for the LTE-A system.

The 3GPP LTE-Advanced has been attracting much attention recently, where the channel bandwidth would be beyond the maximum bandwidth of LTE, 20 MHz. In LTE, single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) was accepted as the uplink access scheme due to its advantage of very low cubic metric (CM). For LTE-A wideband transmission, multicarrier access would be more effective than single carrier access to make use of multi-user diversity and can maintain the physical channel structure of LTE, where the control information is transmitted on the edges of each 20 MHz. In this paper, we discuss the access schemes in bandwidth under 20 MHz as well as over 20 MHz. In the case of bandwidth under 20 MHz, we propose the access schemes allowing discontinuous resource allocation to enhance average throughput while maintaining cell-edge user throughput, that is, DFT-spread-OFDM with spectrum division control (SDC) and adaptive selection of SC-FDMA and OFDM (SC+OFDM). The number of discontinuous spectrums is denoted as spectrum division (SD). For DFT-S-OFDM, we define a parameter max SD as the upper limit of SD. We evaluate our proposed schemes in bandwidth under 20 MHz and find that SC+OFDM as well as SDC with common max SD or UE-specific max SD can improve average throughput while their cell-edge user throughput can approach that of SC-FDMA. In the case of bandwidth over 20 MHz, we consider key factors to decide a feasible access scheme for aggregating several 20 MHz-wide bands.

This paper presents an overview of radio interface technologies for cooperative transmission in 3GPP LTE-Advanced, i.e., coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) for heterogeneous deployments, and relay transmission techniques. This paper covers not only the technical components in the 3GPP specifications that have already been released, but also those that were discussed in the Study Item phase of LTE-Advanced, and those that are currently being discussed in 3GPP for potential specification in future LTE releases.

This paper proposes likelihood function generation of complexity-reduced Maximum Likelihood Detection with QR Decomposition and M-algorithm (QRM-MLD) suitable for soft-decision Turbo decoding and investigates the throughput performance using QRM-MLD with the proposed likelihood function in multipath Rayleigh fading channels for Orthogonal Frequency and Code Division Multiplexing (OFCDM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing. Simulation results show that by using the proposed likelihood function generation scheme for soft-decision Turbo decoding following QRM-MLD in 4-by-4 MIMO multiplexing, the required average received signal energy per bit-to-noise power spectrum density ratio (Eb/N0) at the average block error rate (BLER) of 10-2 at a 1-Gbps data rate is significantly reduced compared to that using hard-decision decoding in OFCDM access with 16 QAM modulation, the coding rate of 8/9, and 8-code multiplexing with a spreading factor of 8 assuming a 100-MHz bandwidth. Furthermore, we show that by employing QRM-MLD associated with soft-decision Turbo decoding for 4-by-4 MIMO multiplexing, the throughput values of 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps are achieved at the average received Eb/N0 of approximately 4.5 and 9.3 dB by QPSK with the coding rate of R = 8/9 and 16QAM with R = 8/9, respectively, for OFCDM access assuming a 100-MHz bandwidth in a twelve-path Rayleigh fading channel.