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• LTE delivers superior speed to businesses and residents throughout rural America
• Ericsson continues to be the technology and services leader in working with regional carriers to bring benefits of LTE to consumers
• North America accounts for nearly half of all LTE subscriptions globally

• Small cells provide a cost effective means to increase LTE network capacity
• Small cell deployment is a key part of Ericsson’s heterogeneous network strategy
• Continues Ericsson’s long-standing LTE vendor relationship with Verizon

• Ericsson will deploy a 4G network for the leading Icelandic operator Síminn
• The agreement will strengthen Síminn’s position to serve its subscribers in both central and remote areas of the country
• Ericsson Síminn will join their forces to provide access to innovative mobile broadband services, anywhere and anytime, and open new and exciting opportunities for the Icelandic consumers.

In this new Tech Talk, Maria Edvardsson from Ericsson Research looks at the evolution of LTE and describes six of the technical areas that we believe in for the evolution of LTE.

This paper presents the first receiver supporting non-contiguous intra-band and inter-band carrier aggregation, capable of receiving up to three 20 MHz LTE carriers simultaneously. The single-chip receiver implements a reconfigurable architecture in 65nm CMOS, occupies 14.8 mm2 and consumes 155mW and 435 mW when receiving one and three carriers, respectively.

This paper provides a high-level overview of LTE Rel-10, sometimes referred to as LTE-Advanced. First, a brief overview of the first release of LTE and some of its technology components are given, followed by a discussion on the IMTAdvanced requirements. The technology enhancements introduced to LTE in Rel-10, carrier aggregation, improved multiantenna support, relaying and improved support for heterogeneous deployments, are described. The paper is concluded with simulation results, showing that LTE Rel-10 fulfills and even surpasses the requirements for IMT-Advanced.

The potential link performance gain obtained with up to 8x8 MIMO transmission as standardized in 3GPP LTE Release 10 have been evaluated in an indoor measurement campaign using a testbed implementation. For well-separated antennas, the result show increasing downlink throughput when increasing the number of transmit and receive antennas, up to a median throughput of 335 Mbps for an 8x8 MIMO configuration on a 20 MHz carrier. A similar and only slightly smaller throughput is achieved when using a compact UE array of a size that is more reasonable for a consumer device implementation.

MIMO is one of the techniques used in LTE Release 8 to achieve very high data rates. A field trial was performed in a pre-commercial LTE network. The objective is to investigate how well MIMO works with realistically designed handhelds in band 13 (746-756 MHz in downlink). In total, three different handheld designs were tested using antenna mockups. In addition to the mockups, a reference antenna design with less stringent restrictions on physical size and excellent properties for MIMO was used. The trial comprised test drives in areas with different characteristics and with different network load levels. The effects of hands holding the devices and the effect of using the device inside a test vehicle were also investigated. In general, it is very clear from the trial that MIMO works very well and gives a substantial performance improvement at the tested carrier frequency if the antenna design of the hand-held is well made with respect to MIMO. In fact, the best of the handhelds performed similar to the reference antenna.

Multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) is a technique to achieve high data rates in mobile communication networks. Simulations are performed at both the antenna level and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) system level to assess the performance of realistic handheld devices with dual antennas at 750 MHz. It is shown that MIMO works very well and gives substantial performance gain in user devices with a quarter-wavelength antenna separation.