Utran Long Term Evolution in 3GPP

The 3^rd Generation Partner Ship Project (3GPP) produced the first version of WCDMA standard in the end of 1999, which is the basis of the Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS) deployed in the field today. This release, called release 99, contained all the basic elements to meet the requirements for IMT-2000 technologies. Release 5 introduced the high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) in 2002, enabling now more realistic 2 Mbps and even beyond with data rates up to 14 Mbps. Further Release 6 followed with high speed uplink packet access (HSUPA) in end of 2004, with market introduction expected in 2007. Alongside with on-going further WCDMA development, work on evolved universal terrestrial radio access (UTRA) has been initiated in 3GPP. The objective of evolved UTRA is to develop a framework for the evolution of the 3GPP radio-access technology towards wider bandwidth, lower latency and packet-optimized radio-access technology with peak data rate capability up to 100 Mbps. This paper introduces the requirements, the current state of progress in 3GPP, findings on the performance, agreed architecture as well as expected schedule for actual specification availability