Pushing the Limits of LTE: A Survey on Research Enhancing the Standard

TL;DR

This paper surveys research efforts to enhance LTE standards, highlighting the development of a standard-compliant simulation platform that facilitates reproducible and innovative research within real-world constraints.

Contribution

It introduces an open-source LTE simulation platform that bridges the gap between research and standardization, enabling reproducible studies within the LTE framework.

Findings

Research within LTE standards can be innovative and encouraged.

The simulation platform supports practical, reproducible LTE research.

Potential improvements in LTE performance are demonstrated.

Abstract

Cellular networks are an essential part of todays communication infrastructure. The ever-increasing demand for higher data-rates calls for a close cooperation between researchers and industry/standardization experts which hardly exists in practice. In this article we give an overview about our efforts in trying to bridge this gap. Our research group provides a standard-compliant open-source simulation platform for 3GPP LTE that enables reproducible research in a well-defined environment. We demonstrate that much innovative research under the confined framework of a real-world standard is still possible, sometimes even encouraged. With examplary samples of our research work we investigate on the potential of several important research areas under typical practical conditions.