A Comprehensive Review of Modulation Techniques used in Long Term Evolution

3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has come up with a technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE) to attain a new high speed radio access in the field of mobile communications. Design of wireless communication system has been an important and challenging problem due to the nature of wireless channel. There are number of factors involved in the performance of a LTE system. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA ) and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA ) are a dominant part of future mobile communication. This paper describes about LTE physical layer, OFDMA and SC-FDMA receiver and transmitter structures, draw attention on the factor that influences the performance and improvement of multiple access techniques. The substantial use of the adaptive modulation in LTE is the main highlight of the paper. The selection of modulation techniques on the basis of BER, Error probability and SNR are computed.