LTE‐Advanced and Release 10

Release 10 enhances the capabilities of LTE, to make the technology compliant with the International Telecommunication Union's requirements for IMT‐Advanced. This chapter covers the new features of the LTE‐Advanced air interface, by focusing on carrier aggregation, relaying and enhancements to multiple antenna transmission on the uplink and downlink. It discusses the techniques that are used to control interference in heterogeneous networks, in which the cells are on the same carrier frequency but have different sizes. Finally, it covers techniques for offloading traffic from the LTE network and for controlling the load from machine‐type communications. Release 10 implements cross carrier scheduling by adding a carrier indicator field (CIF) to each DCI format, which indicates the carrier to be used for the subsequent transmission. In LTE‐Advanced, the uplink is enhanced to support single user multiple input multiple output (MIMO), using up to four transmit antennas and four transmission layers.