Control Channels for beyond LTE-Advanced
16 January 2013
With the rapid deployment of LTE roll out by Service Provides worldwide establishing it as the dominant 4G wireless technology, standardization activities of releases beyond LTE-Advanced are currently being actively progressed in 3GPP RAN. Key enhancements such as Further Enhancement of Downlink MIMO, Heterogeneous Networks, and Carrier Aggregation in LTE-Advanced has revealed and motivated the standardization of an enhanced physical control channel(s) for the LTE air interface. The Enhanced Physical Downlink Control Channel shall be able to support increased control channel capacity, to support frequency domain Inter Cell Interference Coordination, to achieve improved spatial reuse of control channel resource, to support beamforming and/or diversity and at the same time able to operate on the legacy carriers and future New Carrier Type. In this paper, we analyzed the features and capacity of enhanced control channels considered in the Release 11 of LTE, starting with the motivations and the standardized EPDCCH and its performance. The paper proceeds to consider other control channels future enhancements with emphasis on the much anticipated upcoming small cells enhancements for Release 12 of LTE.