Master Thesis Project at Ericsson

Title: Radio resource management in LTE Where: Ericsson Research, Linkping When: Fall -08 Requirements: M Sc studies, preferably communication profile, at least 4 in average grade Contact person: Gunnar Bark, Ericsson Research, gunnar.bark@ericsson.com Description: Radio access technologies for cellular mobile networks are continuously being evolved to meet the future demands for higher data rates, improved coverage and capacity. Currently evolutions of the 3G systems, 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE), including new access technologies and new architectures are being developed by Ericsson and others. One of the main targets for LTE is that the access technology should be flexible to use in existing frequency allocations and new frequency allocations in order to allow for easy introduction in spectrum with existing deployments. Both FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) and TDD (Time Division Duplex) where upand downlink are separated in frequency and in time, respectively, will be supported. To allow for this flexible spectrum solutions the access technology chosen is based on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). To efficiently manage the radio resources in LTE, fast dynamic scheduling is supported where, time and frequency resources can be assigned on a 1ms time frame. The scheduler may be provided with information on the channel quality (CQI), so for each sub-band the resource assignment can be based on channel quality. Typically the scheduler assigns users to the sub-bands where the channel is indicated to be good, i.e. channel dependent frequency domain scheduling. For downlink link adaptation and scheduling, CQI reports will be provided from the mobile terminal and sent in the uplink. In order to reach the very aggressive LTE performance, capacity and coverage, it was already at an early stage clear that advanced multi-antenna transmission technologies, sometimes also referred to as MIMO (Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output) antenna solutions, had to be included as an integrated part of the LTE radio access technology. MIMO transmission is basically a way to provide very high data rates in a limited transmission bandwidth when the radio-channel quality so allows, i.e. in case of high signal strength and low interference/noise levels. Another main target for LTE development is to simplify and reduce cost for operation of the live radio networks. Interesting research topics are; control theory applied on radio network algorithms, new algorithms to support automatic features, measurements to support automatic features and using localization information to support new RN features. The exact master thesis scope will be settled this fall, together with the student, just as we always do. But it will be about LTE radio resource control, likely including TDD, scheduling and/or MIMO.