Last Updated: 27/12/2004
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration agreement that was established in December 1998. The collaboration agreement brings together a number of telecommunications standards bodies which are known as “Organizational Partners”. The current Organizational Partners are ARIB, CCSA, ETSI, ATIS, TTA, and TTC. Their website is http://www.3gpp.org. 3GPP is in charge of standardising WCDMA technology that is the most popular 3G Wireless standard.
Since all the features required cannot be completed simultaneously in one go, it was decided that the 3G mobile will consist of some basic features. After that new functionalities will be added in groups and released. The groups of this new set of functionalities are called releases. Each new Release supports the Old Release plus new set of features. It might also happen that some of the existing functinality was incorrect, it would then be corrected in the new release.
The following are 3GPP releases:
Release 99 contained all the basic 3GPP features. This contains a long list that would be incomplete without explanation. Please see the following document for complete Release 99 related information. http://www.3gpp.org/Releases/Rel99-Features-Draft.pdf.
Release 2000 or Release 00 was supposed to be ready by the year 2000 but the things got delayed so much that they decided to scrap it and replace it by Release 4 and Release 5.
The following are the features of Release 4: More information is available in the following document: http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/tsg_sa/TSG_SA/TSGS_14/Docs/PDF/SP-010724.pdf
The Main Features of Release 5 are:
Release 5 has many more features than the ones that are listed above. A detailed list of features and their explanations are available at http://www.3gpp.org/Releases/Rel5_features_v_2003_09_09.htm. Also look at http://www.3gamericas.org/pdfs/umtsrel5_beyond_june2004.pdf.
The following are main Release 6 Features:
Another significant feature targeted for Rel’6 is the Enhanced Uplink for Dedicated CHannels (EUDCH) feature. As the importance of IP-based services increases, demand to improve the coverage and throughput as well as reduce the delay of the uplink also increases. Applications that could benefit from an enhanced uplink may include services like video clips, multimedia, e-mail, telematics, gaming, videostreaming etc. The EUDCH feature investigates enhancements that can be applied to UMTS in order to improve the performance on the uplink dedicated transport channels. To enhance uplink performance, features similar to those introduced for HSDPA in the downlink are being considered including:
Increasing spectral efficiency of the radio interface is of paramount importance in order to make the most out of the limited suitable spectrum and the operators’ investment in site resources. Multiple-Input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems, motivated by an information theoretic consideration, promise a considerable increase in spectral efficiencies. Therefore, support for MIMO systems is one key element considered for evolution of the UMTS radio interface. A large effort is expected to go into the maintenance and enhancement of the considerable new capabilities which have been introduced in the previous two releases. For example, IMS will further be enhanced, e.g. by explicit support for wireline access allowing fixed-mobile convergence. In addition the integration of alternative radio technologies such as WLAN will be considered, e.g. by allowing handover and closer integration with legacy voice services.
Please goto http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info. Scroll to the spec number of interest appended with –CRs.htm and there you will find the original CRs referenced by CR number. E.g, for 25.331 http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/25331-CRs.htm.
You can look at 3GPP's site for any unanswered questions. The website address is http://www.3gpp.org/faq/faq.htm . |
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