The Global system for mobile communications (GSM) is the dominant wireless cellular standard with over 3.5 billion subscribers worldwide covering more than 85% of the global mobile market. Furthermore, the number of worldwide subscribers using high-speed packet access (HSPA) networks topped 70 million in 2008. HSPA is a 3 Gevolution of GSM supporting high-speed data transmissions using WCDMA technology. Global uptake of HSPA technology among consumers and businesses is accelerating, indicating continued traffic growth for high-speed mobile networks worldwide. In order to meet the continued traffic growth demands, an extensive effort has been underway in the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) to develop a new standard for the evolution of GSM/HSPAtechnology towards a packet-optimized system referred to as Long-Term Evolution (LTE).

The goal of the LTE standard is to create specifications for a new radio-access technology geared to higher data rates, low latency and greater spectral efficiency. The spectral efficiency target for the LTE system is three to four times higher than the current HSPA system. These aggressive spectral efficiency targets require pushing the technology envelope by employing advanced air-interface techniques such as low-PAPR orthogonal uplink multiple access based on SC-FDMA (single-carrier frequency division multiple access) MIMO multiple-input multiple-output multi-antenna technologies, inter-cell interference mitigation techniques, low-latency channel structure and single-frequency network (SFN) broadcast. The researchers and engineers working on the standard come up with new innovative technology proposals and ideas for system performance improvement.