Special SubFrame in LTE
Special SubFrame in LTE
As the single frequency block is shared in time domain between UL and DL the
transmission in TDD is not continuous. All UL transmission need to be on hold
while any downlink resource it is used and the other way around.
Switching between transmission directions has a small hardware delay (for both
UE and NodeB) and needs to be compensated. To control the switching between
the UL and DL a guard period GP is allocated which compensates for the
maximum propagation delay of interfering components.
Description of the switching mechanism:
In LTE TDD there is maximally one UL->DL and one DL->UL transition per 5ms
period (half frame)
UL-> DL transition
Is done for all intra-cell UEs by the process of time alignment. The NodeB
instructs each UE to use a specific time offset so that all UEs signals are aligned
when they arrive at Node-B. So UL is synchronous very similar to FDD (intra cell
case only!)
DL->UL transition
The interference coming from other DL neighbors has to be avoided
4. When switching from downlink to uplink, there is need for a special switching
subframe. No special subframe is used when switching from uplink to downlink.