 Long-term evolution advanced is known as advanced over LTE because of some very interesting and smart improvements which were made on top of LTE. That is, there are certain radio level improvements which were incorporated which resulted directly into increased data rates. Let's look at these in this module. The LTE advanced is basically an extension or an advancement of the LTE. The primary goal was to meet the IMT advanced requirement set by the ITUR that is radio. The most important thing was that LTE advanced could not be decoupled or disassociated with LTE because backward compatibility had to be maintained. What it means is that if we have LTE user equipment and if the network is LTE advanced the network is supposed to provide LTE network services to LTE only user equipment. If the user equipment happens to be LTE advanced then the LTE advanced network can provide all the value-added features that LTE only user equipment could not get. Now let's look at the improvements. First and foremost is a significant improvement in the overall management of the spectrum. The flexibility that is demonstrated by LTE advanced to make use of the wide band available in the 800 to 900 megahertz spectrum, 1800 to 1900 megahertz spectrum the ISM band, the 2.1 gigahertz band, 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz ISM bands. It means the spectrum is available. How this spectrum can be utilized in the most efficient and flexible manner is the highlight of the LTE advanced radio. The second one is carrier aggregation. Carrier aggregation, we are going to look at it in more detail in due course. It means to cherry pick, to hand pick available frequencies, available bands in different frequency spectra. This is achieved through very interesting radio design but this is again a very interesting advancement in the radio side. Then another advancement that improved LTEA in terms of coverage and data rate is the incorporation of different kinds of deployments such as the macro cells which is typical of the 3G radio access network. It is the native or the basic deployment strategy. Then there are relay nodes. Relay nodes actually do not form another cell but extend the coverage of the cell. Then reducing the coverage down to a few hundred meters even tens of meters in the Pico and Femto cells. So these are some advanced incorporations on the radio side because you know that if we reduce the size of the cell and keep the transmitted power high we can achieve higher data rates. Then better network coverage and frequency reuse or spectral efficiency at the edges of the cell because most of the inter cell interference is pronounced at the at their overlapping edges. For that using certain frequencies which are not interfering at runtime is interesting highlight also known as the interference management in a very robust manner. Then using MIMO systems to have a higher data rate. Incidentally basic MIMO and OFDM was already available in 3G RAN such as HSPA but more massive MIMO such as 2x4 4x4 RAN incorporated in LTEA.