At a recent workshop in China the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) agreed to plans for the further evolution of Long Term Evolution (LTE) so that it can be considered within the International Telecommunication Union’s recent call for ‘IMT-Advanced’ technologies. The requirements for ‘LTE-Advanced’ will be contained in a new technical report to be issued by 3GPP: TR 36.913 Requirements for LTE-Advanced.

The workshop, organized by the 3GPP Technical Specification Group (TSG) RAN and hosted by the ZTE Corp. in Shenzhen, China, was attended by over 200 experts. The 60 technical contributions presented at the workshop contained proposals for technical requirements and concepts for LTE-Advanced.

François Courau, chairman of the LTE-Advanced workshop, said, “The technical report (under the rapporteurship of NTT DoCoMo, Japan) will identify key requirements for LTE-Advanced, which is clearly designed as a further evolutionary step, building on the existing LTE specifications and taking into account additional frequency spectrum. Paramount within LTE-Advanced will be improvements to existing performance parameters whilst at the same time reducing the cost of delivering these improved services to the end customer. Improved spectral efficiency will also be very high on the list of the benefits to be achieved through LTE-Advanced technologies.”

The conclusions drawn from this workshop, which can be found in REV-080058 at: ftp://ftp.3gpp.org/workshop/2008-04-07_RAN_IMT_Advanced/Docs/ will be further debated during the next 3GPP TSG RAN Working Group meetings, which will be held in Kansas City, USA, during May 2008 and by 3GPP TSG RAN up to the end of 2008.