June 19, 2014 - Sophia Antipolis, France

A workshop to share ideas on LTE in unlicensed spectrum has been described as a “fruitful contribution to the start of work in the project” as it is considered by cellular operators as an important complement to meet future traffic demands.

In his summing up Dino Flore, Workshop & 3GPP TSG-RAN Chairman, looked at the main deployment options and requirements emerging from the discussion, calling for interested companies to work offline on a 3GPP Study Item proposal that will define the scope of the technical work, which will be discussed in the regular 3GPP approval process from the next meeting in September 2014.

Some major observations:

• Early focus to be on unlicensed operation in 5 GHz. However, the core technology should be as frequency agnostic as possible.

• While different regional requirements emerged from the discussion, most of the companies prefer 3GPP to focus on the standardization of a global solution that can work across regions.

• Strong interest to study both indoor and outdoor deployments.

• Initial focus will likely be on Licensed-Assisted Carrier Aggregation operation to aggregate a primary cell, using licensed spectrum, to deliver critical information and guaranteed Quality of Service, and a co-located secondary cell, using unlicensed spectrum, to opportunistically boost datarate.
  • Two available options: (1) Secondary cell on unlicensed spectrum used for supplemental downlink capacity only, (2) Secondary cell on unlicensed spectrum used for both supplemental downlink and uplink capacity. Many companies propose to start working on (1) and then follow with (2)

• Fair coexistence between LTE and other technologies such as WiFi as well as between LTE operators is seen necessary.

Dino Flore noted; “Initial results suggest that, when augmented with the appropriate coexistence mechanisms to operate in unlicensed spectrum, e.g. Listen-Before-Talk, LTE can effectively coexist with Wifi and outperform it in terms of spectral efficiency”

176 participants listened to presentations (See links below) that covered the full range of solutions that will now be studied.

 Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP

Further Reading

• Access directly the Workshop folder…click here
• 3GPP workshop on LTE in unlicensed spectrum - Chairman's Summary
• RP-140770 - Study on Licensed-Assisted Access using LTE