LTE™ (Long Term Evolution) is the name given to a project within the Third Generation Parnership Project (3GPP) to improve the UMTS mobile phone standard to cope with future technology evolutions.

Although an evolution of UMTS, the LTE air interface is a completely new system based on OFDMA in the downlink and SC-FDMA in the uplink.

Spectral efficiency is improved via variable channel bandwidth and use of higher order modulations. LTE also supports multi-antenna technologies (MIMO).

The LTE air interface will be added to the specification in Release 8 and can be found in the 36-series of the 3GPP specifications.

There is low dependency between the core network and the radio access network.

The architecture resulting is called EPS (Evolved Packet System) and comprises E-UTRAN (Evolved UTRAN) on the access side and EPC (Evolved Packet Core) on the core side.