The next important milestone is the standardization of LTE-Advanced (LTE Rel.10 and beyond). To keep up with the today's rapidly growing traffic, especially by the wide spread of smart phone devices, it became necessary to further enhance LTE Rel.9 and achieve much higher level of system performance, while keeping the backward compatibility. Accordingly, the radio access interface specifications for LTE-Advanced has been developed in the beginning of 2011.

ITU-T has announced new requirements including spectral efficiency, higher bandwidth, and lower latency. To meet these competitive requirements, a series of new technologies have been discussed to introduce into LTE-Advanced, such as Carrier Aggregation, Enhanced Uplink Multi-antenna Transmission, and CoMP Transmission/Reception. LTE-Advanced will enable 1Gbps downlink bandwidth in addition to the existing LTE service and open a new era of true wireless broadband services in the near future.

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