Multipath Wave Propagation Effects on the Performance of OFDM UMTS-LTE Communications System

Future generation mobile telecommunication systems are expected to provide high data rate service and improved system performance. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a project within the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) that aims at improving the current 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) standard to cope with future requirements and to maintain competitiveness in the long term. This paper analyzes the requirements for this evolution and evaluates the performance of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) UMTS-LTE system under different propagation impairments (AWGN, Pedestrian and Vehicular multipath fading channels of different speeds) in terms of bit and symbol error rates (BER and SER) for different modulation formats.