IS-Wireless has delivered a tutorial entitled: LTE PHY & LTE Network Planning during SDR’12 – WInnComm – Europe , which was held in Brussels in Belgium on the 29th of June, 2012. Full conference’s agenda is available here. 

Abstracts: 

LTE PHY Layer Engineering 

This tutorial provides a description of the LTE Layer 1 and E-UTRA nodes, namely eNB and UE, combining theory with the practical hands-on demonstrations. The demonstrations include generation and observation of the eNB and UE signals and are based on the state-of-the-art LTE PHY Lab, which is a comprehensive implementation of the 3GPP Release 8, 9 and 10 E-UTRA physical layer. Students are guided through the architecture of eNB and UE, and have the chance to learn the role of each processing block, as well as to generate Layer 1 waveforms corresponding to every physical channel. In addition to that, they evaluate the influence of such effects like uncompensated synchronization offsets. Observations are made either in the time domain (osciloscope function) or in the frequency domain (spectrum analyser function) so the students are getting prepared to work with real measurement tools in implementation or testing of the real equipment. The tutorial is ended by making suggestions on the possible test scenarios for real eNBs and UEs. 

LTE Radio Network Planning 

LTE radio interface (i.e., E-UTRA) is build around OFDMA, SC-FDMA and MIMO. This is a different set of radio transmission techniques than the one used in the previous 3GPP standards (such as GERAN or UTRAN). OFDMA and SC-FDMA allow to utilize the parallelism in the frequency domain and to manage the spectral resource with the high level of granularity. MIMO provides yet another domain, namely space. These schemes cause the radio planning process for LTE to be different from the previous standards. In this tutorial, we highlight the most important differences in the radio interface architecture, draw conclusions on how they impact the process of radio network planning and formulate a basic set of recommendations on how to deal with these differences.