LTE - Advanced Evolution in Releases 12 - 13

This chapter covers summary of Release 12 and 13 enhancements outside the big themes such as small cells, macro cell evolution or long‐term evolution (LTE)‐unlicensed. It describes machine‐type communications (MTC), enhanced co‐operative multipoint transmission (CoMP) with non‐ideal backhaul, feature‐driven development (FDD)‐time‐division duplex (TDD) carrier aggregation, WLAN interworking as well as device‐to‐device (D2D) operation intended both for public safety and commercial use cases. The third generation partnership project (3GPP) has specified power saving mode (PSM) as part of Release 12. The further work in 3GPP for Release 13 is on‐going to specify reduced and cost optimized capability user equipment (UE) classes to enable even lower price point for LTE M2M modem implementation. Release 12 work with Enhanced CoMP was focusing on the support of scheduler coordination with the non‐ideal backhaul, not impacting the UE side at all. For Release 13 study was started on single cell point to multipoint operation.