Advantages of LTE compared to earlier RAT's

1.

1. Its possible to do scheduling, link adaptation and interleaving in both the frequency domain as well as in the time domain.
2. Reduced inter-symbol-interference due to cyclic prefix and lower symbol rate for each sub-carrier. 
3. Reduced frequency selectivity due to the narrow bandwidth of each sub-carrier which makes is possible to use less complex combining/equalization schemes (MRC instead of MMSE). 
4. Flexible bandwidth is easy to achieve by altering the number of sub-carriers. 
5. Efficient equalization for a single carrier bandwidth in excess of 5Mhz is a seriously complex task whereas for a multi carrier system with narrow individual bandwidths the need for equalization is very small.  
6. Backwards compatibility with earlier technologies is not prioritized if conflicting with LTE performance. 
7. Maximum throughput in theory for a 20Mhz channel without MIMO is 86,4 Mbps for LTE and 84Mbps for HSPA. For all the above reasons however, average throughput is expected to be 50 % higher for LTE. 
8. Due to the fact that LTE does not use spreading codes, the scrambling can be directly applied to the code bits which reduces the implementation complexity. However, even with the resources partitioned in the time/frequency domain, scrambling is still needed in LTE to separate the target signal from interference.