LTE Interview Question and Answer
LTE Interview Question and Answer
By reading the PDCCH (this is valid for both UL scheduling grants and DL
scheduling assignments).
PDCCH contains DCI (DL control information), which indicate 3 different
messages:1. Uplink scheduling grants for PUSCH
2. Downlink scheduling assignment for PDSCH
3. TPC command for PUSCH and PUCCH
2. In which node is PDCP located and what are the tasks of that
protocol?
PDCP is located in the eNode-B and handles encryption of user data streams
and reordering at handover.
Each radio bearer also uses one PDCP instance. PDCP is responsible for
header compression (ROHC Robust Header Compression) and
ciphering/deciphering. Obviously header compression makes sense for IP
diagram's, but not for signaling. Thus the PDCP entities for signaling radio
bearers will usually do ciphering/deciphering only.
3. What is a resource block?
A Resource Block (RB) is a time- and frequency resource that occupies 12
subcarriers (12x15 kHz = 180 kHz) and one slot
(= 0.5 ms). RBs are allocated in pairs by the scheduler (then referred to as
Scheduling Blocks).
4. What are two radio interface solutions that increase the spectrum
efficiency?
Higher order modulation:-LTE support all types of modulation schemes like
QPSK,16 QAM, 64 QAM that results in high data rate
MIMO:- MIMO increase data rate by doubles in 2*2 and 4 folds in 4*4 case.
5. How large is a Resource Block?
12 subcarriers 15 kHz = 180 kHz in frequency domain and one slot (0.5 ms)
in time domain
6. What is the smallest unit the scheduler can allocate? What is the
name of that unit?
Two consecutive Resource Blocks (RBs) which is called a Scheduling Block
(SB). The duration of it is 1 ms and its called TTI.
7. Why is the Cyclic Prefix (CP) needed?
In order to reduce the ISI (Inter Symbol Interference) and ICI (Inter Carrier
Interference) in time dispersive environments.
Insertion of cyclic prefix prior to transmission improves robustness in timedispersive channels and Spectral efficiency loss.The Length of cyclic prefix is
4.7microsec in normal case.The CP is copy of the last part of the symbol
in order to preserve the subcarrier orthogonality. This is possible since
the FFT is a cyclic operation, but it is required that the time dispersion of the
With MIMO, multiple antennas and advanced signal processing such as spatial
multiplexing, the radio channel can be separated into several layers, or data
pipes. Up to four layers can be utilized. This corresponds to up to four times
higher data rates for a given bandwidth.
5. Explain the concepts of channel rank, layers, data rate
multiplication and codebook.
The radio channel properties decide the maximum channel rank that can be
used, i.e. how many layers the channel support at the moment. The number
of layers that can be transmitted over the radio channel is equal to the data
rate multiplication (e.g. two layers give two times the data rate compared to
a solution without MIMO). The complex weights that are applied at each
antenna port are selected from a finite
codebook. The codebook index is suggested and indicated by the UE.
6. How HARQ works?
Multiple simple stop-and-wait ARQ processes are processed by the HARQ
entity in the MAC protocol. The operation is very fast and has a short roundtrip-time thanks to the short TTI and the fact that it is located in the eNodeB,
close to the radio interface. Feedback from the receiver is sent in terms of
short ACK/NACK messages.
7. How to calculate the maximum theoretical physical peak data rate
in LTE radio interface?
Each OFDM symbol contains, if 64-QAM is used, 6 bits per subcarrier (15kHz).
There are, if normal CP is used, 7 OFDM symbols
per slot. This ends up with 6*7 = 42 bits per slot. One slot is 0.5 ms which
gives us 42/0.5ms = 84kbps per sub-carrier.
If the full bandwidth, 20MHz, is used, there are 20MHz/15kHz=1333 subcarriers.
However, only 1200 of these are used for user data. This corresponds to 100
resource blocks.
1200*84kbps = 100,8 Mbps.
With four MIMO layers, we should be able to achieve 403.2 Mbps of raw data
rate in the physical layer.
What about the user data rate? The data rates used for L1/L2 signaling,
reference signals, PBCH, SCH, layer 3 signaling and
protocol headers has to be subtracted from this figure. Then we end up with
approximately 320 Mbps of user data rate on RLC
level??
In UL we have approximately the same calculation, except that the gain from
MIMO cannot be included, since no SU-MIMO is used in