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With the ubiquitous proliferation of mobile communication, half the earth's human population is actively using this technology. The evolution of mobile communication has witnessed a revolutionary trend over the last two decades. With the advent of more resilient technologies, the mobile industry has migrated from first generation (1G) to fourth generation (4G) Standards. These telecommunication standards are but defined rallying points (Kremecher, 1996). Advances in the field of digital communication have been fueled by the need for higher data rates, supported by progress in solid state electronics (Viterbi, 1991). 3GPPs Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been declared as the fastest growing system in the history of mobile technology (Ericsson Mobility Report, 2012). By the year 2017, half the world's population is expected to be covered by LTE network.
The birth of telecommunications is credited to Marconi in the year 1895, when he demonstrated the first radio transmission (Goldsmith, 2005). However, the growth of cellular communication matured gradually with the AT&T Bell Labs developing the cellular concept in the 1960s (Mac Donald, 1979).
The first generation(1G) standard, known as Advanced Mobile Phone System(AMPS) was developed in the year 1983, followed by 2G standards in 1990s(Rappaport, 2005). There was a fundamental shift in 1G to 2G cellular standards, since 2G marked the advent of digital wireless generation, whereas 1G was analog in nature. Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), became the most popular 2G standard globally. Another 2G standard, IS-95, used Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) as the air interface. CDMA provided capacity advantage and more resistance to interference as compared to TDMA (Lee, 1991). Thereby, CDMA was adopted as the air interface for 3G standards as a more flexible radio technology was required to meet the requirement of International Mobile Telecommunications 2000(IMT 2000) standards (Carsello et al., 1997). The 3G standards offered significant enhancement in data speeds, defining a paradigm shift from voice to data communication. However, as the demand for higher data rates started pouring in, it was realized that CDMA is not suitable for high data rates (Zhang and Xu, 2007). Thus Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which is a multi-carrier technology, gained consideration as the multiple access scheme for 4G standards (Roberts et al., 2006)