Physical Layer Performance of Long Term Evolution Cellular Technology

Despite commercial 3G networks are starting to be fully operational and high speed data packet access (HSDPA) is on its way to be deployed, operators and manufacturers are already in a race towards 4G technologies. The road to 4G has a mandatory milestone in long term evolution (LTE) as it is a promising technology which will allow backwards compatibility besides a higher performance. Thus operators, manufacturers and research institutes are cooperating in the definition of LTE specifications. This paper presents a performance evaluation of LTE downlink physical layer according to the latest 3GPP specifications. Particularly, the main features at the LTE physical layer (like spatial multiplexing or adaptive modulation and coding) are described and analyzed.