Research towards meeting the higher demands for higher data rates was the main reason for the birth of an evolution technology towards the 4th generation mobile communication systems. This evolution to the current 3 rd generation UMTS systems was given the name E-UTRA/UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) by the 3GPP. This paper analyzes the requirements for this evolution and evaluates the performance of the OFDM-LTE system under different propagation impairments (AWGN and multipath fading channels involving Pedestrian and Vehicular scenarios) in terms of bit and symbol error rates (BER and SER) for different modulation formats. © 2008 IEEE.