Preface
Goal and Objective of the Book
This book was prompted by the desire to fill the gap between theoretical descriptions and a more pedagogical description of the main technological components of International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (IMT-Advanced) such as Radio Resource Management (RRM), Carrier Aggregation (CA), improved MIMO support, and relaying. The book also covers the latest research innovations beyond the IMT-Advanced system, in particular, promising areas such as Coordinated Multipoint transmission or reception (CoMP), Network Coding (NC), Device-to-Device (D2D) and spectrum sharing.
Each chapter presents the basis of its topic in a simple way. A review of the latest research advances for that topic is then given. A special emphasis in each area is given to the state of the art of global standardization, in particular LTE-A. Finally, each chapter concludes by looking towards the future and discussing predictions. The reader is expected to have completed a basic undergraduate course in digital communications and mathematics (i.e. probability, calculus and linear algebra).
In order to help the reader extract the important information, the most relevant statements in every chapter are framed in a gray color, or emphasized in italic.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of cellular technology evolution and the latest market and technology trends. Chapter 2 presents innovative concepts for advanced RRM. Carrier Aggregation techniques are presented in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 explains spectrum sharing, especially within the context of femtocell, and game theory. Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), and in particular Multi-User (MU)-MIMO are treated in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 thoroughly describes CoMP. Relaying for IMT-Advanced is addressed in Chapter 7. Chapters 8 and 9 address beyond IMT-Advanced areas, Network Coding and Device-to-Device communications, respectively. In Chapter 10 the end-to-end performance of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) candidates is carefully presented. Chapter 11 discusses the future research trends within wireless communications. The appendices contain additional information related to Chapters 2, 3, 6, 8 and 10.
Writing a book is a long journey involving substantial effort from a group of people. The core contributors of this book are from the “alumni” of the WINNER(+) project, which for more than six years provided an extraordinary forum for collaboration and contribution to global fora such as the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). In 2004 the project paved the way toward InternationalMobile Telecommunications Advanced.
The WINNER project was a six-and-a-half year journey. It started with WINNER-I the first phase in 2004, continued with the second phase, WINNER-II (through years 2006-7), and was finalized in WINNER+ (2008-mid-2010). These successful achievements were possible due to the close cooperation of project partners, respecting the interests of the different organizations. It was an excellent experience to cooperate in such an environment, where problems were analyzed and discussed in a trustful manner, blessed with consensus.
Finally, the editors would welcome any comments and suggestions for improvements or changes. They can be reached at the following e-mail address: [email protected].