From the course: Telecom Network Evolution: 2G-to-6G Technologies, Architecture, and Key Concepts

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Timing advance (TA)

Timing advance (TA)

(inspiring music) - [Instructor] Imagine a classroom where everyone shouts answers at the same time. It's like a chaos happening in the classroom. Now, picture a cell tower where it is trying to hear thousands of devices simultaneously, and without perfect timing, their signals would collide, causing dropped calls and slow data, and timing advance is the way in LTE of synchronizing this chaos. Let's break it down. Even at the speed of light, wireless signals face delays. A user at one kilometer away from the tower has a delay of 3.3 microseconds. Similarly, a user which is far away, maybe at 10 kilometers away from the tower facing 33 microseconds of delay. Now with this problem where device transmits uplinking data without adjustment, their frames arrive at the tower misaligned, which can cause the interference, and in this case, the tower calculates each device delay and commands it to transmit earlier, which is termed as timing advance, to avoid this interference. Now how it works,…

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