Friday 27 March 2009

LTE UE Categories


Five different UE categories have been defined for LTE. These UE categories are often referred to as UE classes. As can be seen in the table above, the low end UE does not support MIMO but the high end UE will support 4x4 MIMO. It is also worth noting that UE class 1 would be inferior to that of the best HSPA UE. It is important to note that regardless of whatever category a UE belongs to, it has to be capable of receiving transmissions from upto four antenna ports. This is because the system information can be transmitted on upto four antenna ports.

It should be noted that some of the capabilities are outside the UE category info. For example the Inter-RAT capabilities like the support of EV-DO or GSM, etc is not specified as part of the UE categories. Similarly the support of duplexing schemes and the support of UE-specific reference signals are outside the scope of this.

Reference:3GPP TS 36.306 - E-UTRA User Equipment (UE) radio access capabilities

11 comments:

ksk_blog said...

Thanks for the info.

Kat said...

The best...as usual. Seriously, thanks so much for this blog.

Kat said...

Once again...came to my rescue.

purnendu said...

How does the eNB or MME know that the UE is a CellPhone or a Data Card?

Zahid Ghadialy said...

I dont think the eNB cares either way.

Anonymous said...

this table is for which BW ?
2.5 , 5, 10 or 20 mhz?

Anonymous said...

I believe it is in a 10MHz channel

Zahid Ghadialy said...

Apologies, I missed the earlier comment. It is in 20MHz channel. See also the new post which specifies 20MHz bandwidth.

Anonymous said...

What does the term scaleable channel bandwidth means for the UE? Does this mean that a UE that is spec'd for supporting 10MHz bandwidth has the intelligence to scale down to other standard channel bandwidths automatically? Can you please point me to the 3gpp specs that provide more details on this? THnx!

Zahid Ghadialy said...

Regarding "scaleable channel bandwidth", I am not sure what the exact definition means.

In practice what it means is that the UE does not need to know a priori the Bandwidth (as you know LTE supports different BW's from 1.4MHz to 20MHz). Once the UE has performed a cell search successfully, it can find out what is the bandwidth of the channel and accordingly the number of sub-carriers.

Unknown said...

Zahid, I'm a fan of your Blog so obviously yours as well....Could you please post some intersting PPT or blog related to SVLTE

I think this is a hot topic for disscussion as well...:)