  This paper covers the practical aspects of commercial long term evolution
(LTE) network design and deployment. The end-to-end architecture of the LTE
network and different deployment scenarios are presented. Moreover, the LTE
coverage and link budget aspects are discussed in details. Theoretical and
practical throughputs of LTE system are analyzed. In addition, capacity
dimensioning of LTE system is explained in details and compared with the
evolved high-speed packet access (HSPA+) system. Additionally, the quality of
service (QoS) of the LTE system and the end-to-end implementation scenarios
along with testing results are presented. Finally, the latency of the LTE
system is analyzed and compared with the HSPA+ system. This paper can be used
as a reference for best practices in LTE network design and deployment.
