Mobile communication has seen the fastest growth in the past few years, different wireless technologies have come and have gone. But the peoples thirst for more speed has not gone. People still want more speed and bandwidth. Also the development of transistor technology in the 70′s had boosted this thirst for more technology.

The latest technology in wireless communication is Long Term Evolution or shortly called as LTE. Its a 3GPP project, that is third generation partnership project between the UMTS and other GSM operators. The most important thing about LTE is, it is downward compatible with GSM ( Global System for Communication). So the operators who have already deployed GSM can now easily upgrade their service to LTE with very less cost. LTE is a 4G (4th generation ) technology.

LTE claims to provide up to 100Mbps downlink speed and upto 75Mbps uplink speed. It used OFDMA or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access for downlink and SC-FDMA or Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access for Uplink. The base station in LTE is called as eNode B and the mobile station is called as UE or User Equipment. Downlink is from the eNode B to UE and Uplink is vice versa. LTE supports multiple bandwidths right from 1.4MHz to 20MHz, it is this flexibility of LTE that is attracting the operators from all over the world. The main reason for this is there is a tight lock in the spectrum now because of so many wireless applications.

LTE has been already deployed in some parts of the world. Companies like Ericson, Nokia Siemens, Tata Elxsi etc are working on the architecture of LTE and LTE is supposed to be deployed through out the world by the end of 2015.