Overview of LTE-A technology

Along with the rapid development in cellular technology, there has also been a significant increase in its user demands. Ever since LTE technology has been established in 2009, the work on its enhancements and requirements had begun and these have been fulfilled successfully by LTE-Advanced. The 3GPP Release 10 or LTE-A has proven to be one of the fastest developing mobile technologies in the world. Further improvements of LTE-A is still on the go and its future releases have enhanced features of MIMO, Carrier Aggregation, co-ordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP), high data rates and speed in order to provide the best user experience as well as proving to be a complete 4G network. In this paper, an overview on the features of LTE-A and its requirements fulfilled in release 11 and 12 for LTE-A is described.