4G LTE-A systems at vehicular speeds: Performance evaluation

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) working group has been instrumental in developing a successful wireless broadband technology in the form of the fourth generation long term evolution (4G LTE). The technology has been a major success with its penetration rate reaching over 75% in all developed countries. The working group is determined to release their fifth generation (5G) wireless standard by 2018, and with this target in mind, researchers have been working towards developing new ideas for the next standard. For improving the success and penetration rate of 5G, it is important to identify the shortcomings of the fourth generation (4G) technologies, particularly from industry perspectives. In this paper, we present some practical results derived from a B3 4G LTE-A system for wireless communications at vehicular speeds. These results were collected from an experiment conducted in collaboration with a telecommunication industry partner. The results are both interesting and significant in the sense that while signal fading, doppler shift, and multipath have attracted significant attention from researchers for their contributions to the low data rate problems at high vehicular speeds in 4G; practical tests suggest that pilot pollution causes frequent service disruption in 4G LTE-A systems at high vehicular speeds, and hence, deserves more attention.