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GUEST EDITORIAL
LTE-ADVANCED AND 4G WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS: PART 2
Charlie (Jianzhong) Zhang
W
Sirikiat Lek Ariyavisitakul
e are pleased to present a sequel to the February 2012 issue’s feature topic LTE-Advanced and 4G Wireless Communications. As stated in our previous Guest Editorial, the goal of the feature topic is to give a comprehensive system-level overview of the 3GPP Release-10 LTEAdvanced (LTE-A) standard and to motivate interested researchers to explore new ideas for further enhancements of future wireless systems. The nine articles in the February 2012 issue provided a detailed overview of key features of Release-10 LTE-A, such as carrier aggregation, relay, reference signal design, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission, and advanced heterogeneous networks (HetNets). This sequel includes five articles, all relating to practical network operations in LTE-A, such as minimum drive test, machine-type operation, and traffic offloading. The first article by Hapsari et al. discusses the use of customer equipments to collect network data, such as radio channel conditions and location information, which allows the operators to reduce operating expenses (OPEX) for testing their networks in the field. The second article by Cheng et al. on overload control in machine-type communication (MTC) describes a holistic approach taken by 3GPP to come up with solutions that satisfy both the radio access network (RAN) and the core network (CN) requirements. The third article by Sankaran gives an overview of several different mechanisms for offloading data traffic to local access points, such as femto-cells or WiFi nodes. The fourth article by Ghosh et al. describes theoretical modeling of HetNets that provides useful insights for planning and operating such a network. The last article by Tao et al. provides an overview of LTE-Advanced features that are based on cooperative communications, such as relay, distributed antenna systems and CoMP. The CoMP field test results in this article are interesting as it helps bridge the gap between theory and reality and provides intuitions on the potential benefits of CoMP. As we conclude the sequel of our feature topic, we would like to again thank all the authors who submitted their manuscripts and the reviewers for high-quality reviews. We would also like to again thank the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Communications Magazine and the IEEE publication staff for continuous support and assistance. We have been touched by the large number of submissions and many heartwarming feedbacks we received on the February 2012 issue. It is to be noted that standardization is an ongoing process and as you read these feature articles about Release-10 LTE-A, many engineers and delegates are busy putting final touches on Release-11, which is expected to be completed by the end
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Meixia Tao
of this year. In June 2012 (same month as this Magazine issue), 3GPP is holding a workshop on Release-12 and beyond, which many hope will be the beginning of yet another exciting journey that takes us beyond what the current generation of technologies can offer. It is through broad participation that new ideas are discovered. We hope that this two-part feature topic will, in some small way, help nurture that evolution.
BIOGRAPHIES CHARLIE (JIANZHONG) ZHANG [SM] (
[email protected]) is a standards Director with the Samsung Dallas Technology R&D center, where he leads the 3GPP LTE/LTE-A standard project as well as a task force focusing on new biomedical devices and applications. He is currently serving as the Vice Chairman (first elected Aug. ’09, re-elected Aug 11) of 3GPP RAN1, the physical layer working group for radio access network. Before he joined Samsung, he was with Motorola from 2006 to 2007 where he worked on the 3GPP HSPA standardization; and he was with Nokia Research Center from 2001 to 2006 where he worked on IEEE 802.16e (WiMAX) standard and EDGE/CDMA/HSPA receiver algorithms. He received his Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is also serving as the Standards subcommittee chair of the Industry DSP applications committee of the IEEE signal processing society. SIRIKIAT LEK ARIYAVISITAKUL [S’85, M’88, SM’93, F’01] (
[email protected]) is Technical Director at Broadcom, where he leads wireless research activities within the office of the CTO. Prior to Broadcom, he was with Bellcore, Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and several start-up companies, one of which was acquired by Texas Instruments. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1983, 1985, and 1988, respectively. He has served as Editor (1995–2000) and Area Editor (2000–2011) for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, Guest Editor for an IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special issue on Broadband Wireless Techniques (1999), and the Secretary of the Communication Theory Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society (1997–2001). He has organized and chaired technical sessions in a number of international conferences, and was a Technical Program Chair for the IEEE 5th International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC’02). He was awarded the IEEE Communications Society 2001 Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communication Theory, and the 1988 Niwa Memorial (young scientist) Award in Tokyo, Japan. MEIXIA TAO (
[email protected]) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in 2003. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. From Aug. 2003 to Aug. 2004, she was a Member of Professional Staff at Hong Kong Applied Science & Technology Research Institute Co. Ltd. From Aug 2004 to Dec. 2007, she was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National University of Singapore as an Assistant Professor. Her current research interests include cooperative transmission, physical layer network coding, resource allocation of OFDM networks, and MIMO techniques. She is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Communications Letters and an Editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. She was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2007 to 2011. She is the recipient of the IEEE ComSoC Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2009.
IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2012
