Small cell enhancement for LTE-advanced release 12 and application of higher order modulation

Abstract

The mobile data traffic is expected to grow beyond 1000 times by 2020 compared with it in 2010. In order to support 1000 times of capacity increase, improving spectrum efficiency is one of the important approaches. Meanwhile, in Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, small cell and hotspot are important scenarios for future network deployment to increase the capacity from the network density domain. Under such environment, the probability of high Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) region becomes larger which brings the possibility of introducing higher order modulation, i.e., 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) to improve the spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we will firstly introduce the ongoing small cell enhancement discussion in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). And then focus on the application of higher order modulation in small cell environment. Important design issues and possible solutions will be analyzed particularly in the higher order modulation discussion.