Telecom Insights

Issues that must be addressed to realize the 5G architecture vision

2016-05-13T17:39:00.001+03:00

Issues to be addressed:

How legacy networks will interface and interoperate with the new network architecture
Determining the optimal physical realization of the network cloud to meet performance and cost targets. Whereas centralization of resources could result in savings from pooling, it could also lead to performance bottlenecks, higher latency, and single points of failure.
Seamless mobility provisioning among different types of deployed local and wide-area technologies with potentially different functionalities also has to be addressed to improve the overall QoE for end users.
Mechanisms to support simultaneous sessions and seamless session mobility across different access networks will also be required to support consistent QoE for end users.
Furthermore, different types of edge networks will also need to be integrated within the 5G network architecture. For instance, the communication needs of cognitive mobile objects (robots2X, drones2X, etc.) will all need to be efficiently supported and integrated in 5G networks.
New paradigms of identity management and charging will need to be developed for 5G, in particular, to cope with the huge number of devices expected to be connected to the network, the diverse use cases, and different edge network topologies

5G challenges, potential enablers, and design principles.

2016-05-12T12:45:00.001+03:00

Based on current trends, it is generally understood that 5G mobile networks must address six challenges that are not adequately addressed by state-of-the-art deployed networks (Long Term Evolution-Advanced, LTE-A): higher capacity, higher data rate, lower E2E latency, massive device connectivity, reduced capital and operations cost, and consistent QoE provisioning. These challenges are shown in the schematic here, together with some potential enablers to address them. The figure provides an overview of the challenges, enablers and corresponding design principles for 5G. It must be noted that the enablers highlighted in the figure also introduce their own set of challenges and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs).

Adopted from an IEEE article by Patrick Kwadwo Agyapong, Mikio Iwamura, Dirk Staehle, Wolfgang Kiess, and Anass Benjebbour

Time spent on apps on mobile devices in the United States (A June 2015 Outlook)

2016-05-10T19:48:00.002+03:00

Mobile apps began to appear in 2008 and were originally designed for simple information retrieval in the form of calendars, email and weather forecasts. However their popularity quickly encouraged developers to expand into other categories including gaming, banking and shopping apps. Time spent on selected mobile social networks in the U.S. has been measured in billion monthly minutes. These figures reveal that users prefer to spend their time on apps rather than the internet when using their mobile devices.

Battery Life Is A Key Feature For Mobile Devices

2016-05-10T19:38:00.002+03:00

Designing a smartphone is ultimately a game of trade-offs: screen size vs. portability; battery life vs. data speeds; appearance vs. sturdiness. Just to name a few. To make these trade-offs, it’s important to know what the consumer wants.

This chart shows which improvements are the most wanted by mobile device users across five countries.

Amazing how battery life is currently big issue in the design of smart phones.

FUTURE CHALLENGES IN 5G WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

2016-05-08T01:32:00.003+03:00

The fourth generation wireless communication systems have been deployed or are soon to be deployed in many countries. However, with an explosion of wireless mobile devices and services, there are still some challenges that cannot be accommodated even by 4G, such as the spectrum crisis and high energy consumption. A question to be raised as the pending standardization of 5G wireless communication networks looms is what would be the possible challenges such networks might faces. Here is a list of these;

OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE METRICS

The evaluation of wireless communication networks has been commonly characterized by considering only one or two performance metrics while neglecting other metrics due to high complexity. For a complete and fair assessment of 5G wireless systems, more performance metrics should be considered. These include spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, delay, reliability, fairness of users, QoS, implementation complexity, and so on. Thus, a general framework should be developed to evaluate the performance of 5G wireless systems, taking into account as many performance metrics as possible from different perspectives. There should be a trade-off among all performance metrics. This requires high-complexity joint optimization algorithms and long simulation times.

REALISTIC CHANNEL MODELS FOR 5G WIRELESS SYSTEMS

Realistic channel models with proper accuracy- complexity trade-off are indispensable for some typical 5G scenarios, such as massive MIMO channels and high-mobility channels (e.g., high-speed train channels and vehicle-to-vehicle channels). Conventional MIMO channel models cannot be directly applied to massive MIMO channels in which different antennas may observe different sets of clusters. Massive MIMO channel models should take into account specific characteristics that make them different from those in conventional MIMO channels, such as the spherical wave-front assumption and non-stationary properties. Also, 3D massive MIMO models, which jointly consider azimuth and elevation angles, are more practical but more complicated.

REDUCING SIGNAL PROCESSING COMPLEXITY FOR MASSIVE MIMO

One technical challenge in developing massive MIMO systems is the signal processing complexity. As transmit and receive signals are quite lengthy, the search algorithms must be performed over many possible permutations of symbols.

In the current literature, massive MIMO research is often treated as a detection problem based on a search motivated by the well-known ML criterion. The existing detection algorithms assume that the channel has been perfectly estimated, which appears to be an unreasonable assumption given the size of the channel matrix and thus amount of channels to be tracked.

INTERFERENCE MANAGEMENT FOR CR (Cognitive Radio) NETWORKS

A major issue in interference-tolerant CR networks in 5G is how to reliably and practically manage the mutual interference of CR and primary systems. Regulating the transmit power is essential for the CR system to coexist with other licensed systems. An interference temperature model is introduced for this purpose to characterize the interference from the CR to the licensed networks. Interference cancellation techniques should also be applied to mitigate the interference at CR receivers. Another issue in interference-tolerant CR networks is that a feedback mechanism is important to periodically inform the CR network about the current interference status at the licensed system.

Big Data for Communication Service Providers (CSPs)

2016-05-07T13:40:00.000+03:00

People, devices and networks are constantly generating data. When users stream videos, play the latest game with friends, or make in-app purchases, their activity generates data about their needs and preferences, as well as their QoE. Even when users put their devices in their pockets, the network is generating location and other data that keeps services running and ready to use. As a result, the rate of mobile network data traffic growth is increasing rapidly. It is estimated that by 2020, the number of smartphone subscriptions will have increased from today’s 2.7 billion to 6.1 billion, and the total amount of mobile traffic generated by smartphones will be five times that of today. The big-data-driven telecom analytics market alone is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent – with annual revenues expected to reach USD 5.4 billion at the end of 2019. Communication service providers (CSPs) can make use of this big data to drive a wide range of important decisions and activities. These include: designing more competitive offers and packages; recommending the most attractive offers to subscribers during the shopping and ordering process; communicating with subscribers about their usage, spending and purchase options; configuring the network to deliver more reliable services; and monitoring QoE to proactively correct any potential problems. All these activities enable improved user experience, increased customer satisfaction, smarter networks and extended network functionality to facilitate progress into the Networked Society. The profound impact that increased broadband networking will have on society will also create business opportunities in new areas for CSPs. Improved real-time connectivity and data management enables the creation of tailored data sets, readily available for analysis and machine learning. This enables data-driven efficiency improvements in several business areas – for example, transport, logistics, energy, agriculture and environmental protection. Furthermore, decision making in business and society will be facilitated by access to insights based on more accurate and up-to-date data. In the past, CSPs were prevented from benefiting from the value of big data on account of its sheer weight. The volume, velocity and variety – or the three Vs – of big data were simply overwhelming.

These data-handling challenges have now largely been met by a variety of easily obtained tools. Distributed databases, complex event-processing frameworks, analytics libraries and so on have been developed in the open-source community and are readily available to CSPs. But like a blank spreadsheet, these tools are simply a platform for data handling. The real value comes from knowing which combination of the vast array of data elements reveals the desired insights. That is where deep network and operational expertise are of paramount value. Only when these key relationships are understood can the necessary insights – such as user behavior, network performance and causes of experience issues – be gained.

The white paper (from ericsson) below explores Big data opportunities that can be explored by CSPs. read further......................

3 pd fsam_bigdatawp-big-data from Alex wanda

High Speed Broadband Mobile Services: What The Customers Are Waiting For

2015-11-02T00:20:00.000+03:00

Demands for wireless data services are showing rapid growth due to evolved networks for high-speed connectivity, wide-scale deployment, flat-rate pricing plans and Internet-friendly devices (smartphones). Consumers rely heavily, and often exclusively, on mobile devices for their communications needs. Therefore, the normal trend is to require, from the mobile system, the same performances as the one offered by fixed networks with ADSL.

Very high bit-rate DSL (VDSL), fiber optics or coaxial cable. This comparison raises the level of the bitrate upto 10 Mbps in the first step, and increases upto 30 Mbps. Officially, the target stands at 100 Mbps, the requirement assigned by ITU-T IMT Advanced, but as observed on the fixed networks, very few customers can make a proper use of such a bitrate.

Applications are developed to follow the technical improvement of the systems. They offer a whole range of services, which subsequently increases the request for more bandwidth and more capacity. Basically, they are composed of:

v Internet applications, as for the fixed networks, including mail, downloads and interactive services; this covers laptops, PDAs and fixed broadband services: the most intuitive set of services that can be provided are related to all the fixed wired Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Internet services that we have today, except that they should be provided wireless and should support mobility;

v Multimedia uploads and exchange services. The high uplink data rates of LTE allow for multimedia upload and exchange services such as file sharing, mobile blogging, social networking etc;

v Internet applications specially designed for the mobile user, in particular location based services. The high data rates combined with mobility of LTE spurs a growth in development of newer and better consumer electronic goods leveraging these advantages. Better gaming consoles, vehicular entertainment systems, portable multimedia players, digital cameras with network capabilities and the likes will be introduced, which will add value to the technology;

v Television, especially download of movies; and real-time television needing some 4 Mbps or 5 Mbps with H264 or H265 encoding. In this category are premium video on demand/music on demand (VOD/MOD) services. LTE provides effective high data rates and differentiated QoS services. Operators can provide premium multimedia-based services such as VOD and MOD to subscribers who wish to avail such services. The critical point for these services will be superior quality coupled with ease of mobility;

v and of course, telephony, with the possibility of wide band telephony (7 kHz instead of 4 kHz). It will support business applications for vertical markets. LTE allows operators to provide services to vertical business markets through business applications such as video conferencing to enterprise customers, video surveillance, services to homes. The list of services that can be provided through, is only restricted by our imagination. Limitless applications can be supported through a truly mobile broadband infrastructure.

v Whichever are the services, wireless operators must also provide a high-quality cellular coverage anywhere customers want to communicate. This requirement is not related to broadband mobile services, it is the principal need for any mobile subscriber and for any service to be provided.

Due to the high costs of backhaul, alternative means to improve cellular coverage in locations, which are difficult to reach, as well as to off-load traffic from the wireless networks. A way to fit to the subscribers’ wishes is to install femtocells, taking advantage of the home Internet high-speed link. It is a way to better support residential and small/home office applications. Vodafone UK was the first operator to launch a commercial femtocell service in Europe (July 2009). AT&T (2H 2009) and Verizon (early 2010) also launched commercial femtocell offerings.

From a competitive perspective, femtocells can help mobile operators seize residential minutes from fixed providers, increase market share and respond to emerging Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Wi-Fi offerings. This of course implies a sharing agreement to be negotiated with the Internet service provider.

From a QoS perspective, femtocells will improve the user experience in the home. This is essential for reducing churn and providing new revenues. Just recall that with the advent of smartphones, mobile communications are heavily using the Internet and high bitrates.

A rapid increase of mobile data usage and the emergence of new applications such as Multimedia Online Gaming (MMOG), mobile TV, web 2.0, streaming contents have motivated the 3GPP to work on the LTE on the way toward 4G mobile.

5G: Emergence of Business Models driven by Cooperation of Nodes

2015-08-31T18:33:00.000+03:00

Identifying attractive business models for the network/service provider and users based on cooperation is essential in order to secure the adoption of 5G technology. This article identifies the Cooperation of Nodes as a driver of new business models showing how we can exploit cooperation between user terminals and heterogeneous networks and operators.

The ability to use mobile terminals at any time and any place without being weary of battery supply seems to be a futuristic approach. However by exploiting smart cooperative networking concepts, this vision can take a step closer to reality.

Exploiting these technology paradigm in tandem, can lead to new radio topologies that are able to provide energy efficient connectivity and thus battery lifetime in mobile phones enabling the use of services that require greater bandwidth than legacy services currently provided by UMTS technology. Most of the research in cooperative networking technology has addressed the technical and engineering ways to save energy.

In present days, to support cooperative networking in the cellular network market, it is absolutely necessary to have good business models that show the main benefits of this new architecture and the revenues associated.

Cooperation is a strategy of a group of entities working or acting together towards a common or individual goal. Correspondingly, the connotation of cooperative networking is described as devices working together to achieve a goal, within a network. Wireless devices, controlled ultimately by human, can be considered as selfish, without any incentive to cooperate by nature.

The reason, that this phenomenon occurs, is that a wireless device is always interested in maximizing its own benefits. So cooperation adds costs to mobile devices, but bringing new services that can increase the performance of a mobile device. However, in any cooperation network, the communication ultimately depends on the willingness of the nodes to cooperate. Such cooperation can only be established and maintained if fairness and profitability are guaranteed among cooperating nodes. Therefore, to avoid the collapse of cooperation, robust cooperation rules and good incentives are required.

To understand the incentives and basic rules for cooperation, an observation from cooperation used in nature is needed. The cooperative network is often realized in the form of a composite access network, which is composed of heterogeneous networks. With the rapid development of technologies and mobile networks, especially with the arrival of LTE, certain characteristics have not been able to compete or keep up with the technology growth, mainly the battery autonomy of mobile devices and other features such as quality of service, higher throughput or spectral efficiency. Dealing with this paradigm provided the impetus for new ideas and possible innovations in the area of cooperation, aimed at combating the negative features resulting from the progress in mobile networks. This cooperation could create, through network operators, mechanisms to encourage customers to cooperate using their mobile devices.

As shown in the illustration besides, one of the main methods of cooperation is the cooperation among mobile devices that can be done through short-range communication technologies such as Bluetooth, UWB or WLAN. These technologies promote low energy consumption, while providing high quality of service. The main avantages of cooperative communications are ;

§ Reducing the power consumption of mobile devices and decreasing the transmission power of base stations;

§ Increasing the quality of service, since with strong signal, customers can achieve better services without failure, e.g. higher data rates;

§ Lower delay between cooperative users;

§ Possibility to create more services like context exchanges between nodes or parallel processing;

§ Decreasing the carbon footprint. Base stations and mobile devices consume much electricity in their use phase, which makes energy saving a valuable contribution for these facilities;

§ Better use of wireless spectrum;

§ Overcoming the limited cellular capacity. For multicast services such as video streaming or file downloading the benefit is obvious. In this case the cooperative devices receive partially the original stream and collaboratively merge it over the short-range communication links.

Nowadays, infrastructure networks (i.e. cellular networks) do not expect or anyhow permit cooperation among connected mobile devices. However, as some wireless environments enable the realization of ad hoc cooperative behaviors, it seems natural that infrastructure networks could also benefit from such cooperation.

From a general perspective, the most interesting business cases are related to battery power savings at mobile devices. Due to its locality and gain from statistical multiplexing (traffic aggregation), such energy saving gain can be observed with ad hoc cooperative networks. Still, wireless ad hoc cooperative networks are to be successful only if they are able to align the current individual and selfish assumptions of the mobile devices into a cooperative paradigm that succeeds to benefit all the entities involved in the cooperation. Current assumptions for wireless ad hoc networking are:

§ Mobile devices are expected to achieve selfish goals, enforced by users or running services;

§ Mobile devices belong to different users;

§ Mobile devices are served by different PLMNs (different network operators).

The enlisted assumptions, which are obstacles to cooperation, can be overcome with the introduction of motivational and incentives systems, which encourage various forms of cooperative behavior. Examples of such cooperative behavior are altruistic cooperation, non-altruistic cooperation or reciprocal cooperation. Each of these forms of behavior has its stability and thus, it has to be resilient to the number of challenges derived from the transient nature of the wireless communication system.

A number of cooperation challenges that need to be addressed to encourage cooperation in ad hoc networks and include;

Motivation and fairness—the two concepts need to be addressed by the cooperative network to encourage cooperation among users, to provide fair access to the resources and to punish the adversaries (to discourage malicious and greedy behaviors). Fairness problems affect also the design of the motivational mechanisms. Furthermore, another known fairness problem is related to location, as mobile devices with more favorable location receive more incentives, leading to even higher income.

• Malicious behaviors—although authentication and access control can reinforce cooperation through prevention against external attacker, there are still possibilities for users to exploit the cooperation even in the presence of effective authentication and access control mechanisms.

• Privacy protection: the key to the success of any reciprocity based cooperation strategy is the ability to identify (and possibly also punish) the defective nodes, and thus, mobile devices cannot stay anonymous. Furthermore, the reputation ratings have to be assigned to correct mobile device and payments or reciprocal behavior returned to correct initiator.

• Cooperation maintenance: as a consequence of mobility or in general, transient changes in channel quality, the node which realizes a cooperative scenario may experience reduction of the quality in provided relaying service or decrease in the reliability of provided information. This may lead to a situation where users are unfairly treated due to decrease in incentives or reputation. Thus, reputation system has to recognize faulty behavior and distinguish it from malicious behavior.

Observability—the results of the cooperation are highly dependent also on the ability to identify and distinguish cooperative behavior from selfish. In wireless networks, a typical situation is that nodes have non-equal information, leading to information asymmetry.

5 Pillars of 5G

2015-06-05T20:33:00.000+03:00

5 key building blocks for 5G, as illustrated besides are elaborated herein. Each of these blocks is discussed with highlights their role and importance for achieving 5G

Evolution of Existing RATs

5G will hardly be a specific RAT, rather it is likely that it will be a collection of RATs including the evolution of the existing ones complemented with novel revolutionary designs. As such, the first and the most economical solution to address the 1000x capacity crunch is the improvement of the existing RATs in terms of SE, EE and latency, as well as supporting flexible RAN sharing among multiple vendors. Specifically, LTE needs to evolve to support massive/3D MIMO to further exploit the spatial degree of freedom (DOF) through advanced multi‐user beamforming, to further enhance interference cancellation and interference coordination capabilities in a hyperdense small‐cell deployment scenario. WiFi also needs to evolve to better exploit the available unlicensed spectrum. IEEE 802.11ac, the latest evolution of the WiFi technology, can provide broadband wireless pipes with multi‐Gbps data rates. It uses wider bandwidth of up to 160 MHz at the less polluted 5 GHz ISM band, employing up to 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). It can also support simultaneous transmissions up to four streams using multi‐user MIMO technique.

The incorporated beamforming technique has boosted the coverage by several orders of magnitude, compared to its predecessor (IEEE 802.11n). Finally, major telecom companies such as Qualcomm have recently been working on developing LTE in the unlicensed spectrum as well as integrating 3G/4G/WiFi transceivers into a single multi‐mode base station (BS) unit.

In this regard, it is envisioned that the future UE will be intelligent enough to select the best interface to connect to the RAN based on the QoS requirements of the running application.

Hyperdense Small‐Cell Deployment

Hyperdense small‐cell deployment is another promising solution to meet the 1000x capacity crunch, while bringing additional EE to the system as well. This innovative solution, also referred to as HetNet, can help to significantly enhance the area spectral efficiency (b/s/Hz/m2).

In general, there are two different ways to realise HetNet:

(i) overlaying a cellular system with small cells of the same technology, that is, with micro‐, pico‐, or femtocells;

(ii) overlaying with small cells of different technologies in contrast to just the cellular one (e.g. High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), LTE, WiFi, and so on).

The former is called multi‐tier HetNet, while the latter is referred to as multi‐RAT HetNet.

Qualcomm, a leading company in addressing 1000x capacity challenge through hyperdense small‐cell deployments, has demonstrated that adding small cells can scale the capacity of the network almost in a linear fashion, as illustrated by Figure besides;

That is, the capacity doubles every time we double the number of small cells. However, reducing the cell size increases the inter‐cell interference and the required control signalling. To overcome this drawback, advanced inter‐cell interference management techniques are needed at the system level along with complementary interference cancellation techniques at the UEs. Small‐cell enhancement was the focal point of LTE R‐12, where the New Carrier Type (NCT) (also known as the Lean Carrier) was introduced to assist small cells by the host macro‐cell. This allows more efficient control plane functioning (e.g. for mobility management, synchronisation, resource allocation, etc.) through the macro‐layer while providing a high‐capacity and spectrally efficient data plane through the small cells.

Finally, reducing the cell size can also improve the EE of the network by bringing the network closer to the UEs and hence shrinking the power budget of the wireless links.

Self‐Organising Network

Self‐Organising Network (SON) capability is another key component of 5G. As the population of the small cells increases, SON gains more momentum. Almost 80% of the wireless traffic is generated indoors. To carry this huge traffic, we need hyperdense small‐cell deployments in homes – installed and maintained mainly by the users – out of the control of the operators.

These indoor small cells need to be self‐configurable and installed in a plug and play manner. Furthermore, they need to have SON capability to intelligently adapt themselves to the neighbouring small cells to minimise inter‐cell interference. For example, a small cell can do this by autonomously synchronising with the network and cleverly adjusting its radio coverage.

Machine Type Communication

Apart from people, connecting mobile machines is another fundamental aspect of 5G. Machine type communication (MTC) is an emerging application where either one or both of the end users of the communication session involve machines. MTC imposes two main challenges on the network. First, the number of devices that need to be connected is tremendously large.

Ericsson (one of the leading companies in exploring 5G) foresees that 50 billion devices need to be connected in the future networked society; the company envisages ‘anything that can benefit from being connected will be connected’. The other challenge imposed by MTC is the accelerating demand for real‐time and remote control of mobile devices (such as vehicles) through the network. This requires an extremely low latency of less than a millisecond, so called “tactile Internet” , dictating 20x latency improvement from 4G to 5G.

Redesigning Backhaul Links

Redesigning the backhaul links is the next critical issue of 5G. In parallel to improving the RAN, backhaul links also need to be reengineered to carry the tremendous amount of user traffic generated in the cells. Otherwise, the backhaul links will soon become bottlenecks, threatening the proper operation of the whole system. The problem gains more momentum as the population of small cells increases. Different communication mediums can be considered, including optical fibre, microwave and mmWave. In particular, mmWave point‐to‐point links exploiting array antennas with very sharp beams can be considered for reliable self‐backhauling without interfering with other cells or with the access links.

Five Disruptive Technology Directions for 5G

2015-05-28T11:58:00.003+03:00

New research directions will lead to fundamental changes in the design of future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. This article describes five technologies that could lead to both architectural and component disruptive design changes: device-centric architectures, millimeter wave, massive MIMO, smarter devices, and native support for machine-to-machine communications. The key ideas for each technology are described, along with their potential impact on 5G and the research challenges that remain. Read on.;………..

Disruptive technology 5 g from Alex wanda

Location-Based Services in LTE

2015-03-25T18:43:00.000+03:00

3GPP Release 9 provides a framework for defining the UE location (so-called UE positioning) in order to support a variety of location-based services (LBSs). In Release 9, the positioning reference signals (PRSs) have been introduced to facilitate the determination of the position of the UE, referred to as a UE-assisted positioning technique. A UE-assisted positioning technique involves the following:

The UE makes some radio signal measurements and
The network determines the UE location (e.g., latitude and longitude) by processing the measurements reported by the UE. This is conducted by a separate system that processes the reported radio information to identify the UE location.

The PRS are transmitted on antenna port 6 and are sent in a configurable number of consecutive subframes of up to five subframes. The E-UTRAN configures the PRS bandwidth (e.g., a certain number of RBs) and the periodicity of the PRS (e.g., one PRS occurrence every 160 subframes). Within a subframe containing the PRS, they are transmitted on more subcarriers and more OFDM symbols when compared to the regular cell-specific reference signals being sent on an antenna. The utilization of more time–frequency resources within a subframe by the PRS can improve the quality of the UE measurements compared to the use of only the basic cell-specific reference signals.

A pseudo-random sequence is sent on the PRS, and this sequence is a function of numerous factors such as PCI (physical layer cell identity), slot number, OFDM symbol number, and the cyclic prefix. The UE observes the PRS from different neighboring cells and makes certain measurements. Examples of such measurements include OTDOA (observed time difference of arrival) measurements such as RSTD (reference signal time difference). RSTD is the relative timing difference between a neighbor cell and the reference cell. The LBS system processes these OTDOA measurements from the UE (implementation-specific algorithms) to estimate the UE location.

In order for OTDOA to function properly, it is mandatory that the eNBs are synchronized to GPS accurate time (i.e., 50 ns). The relative transmission timing of the eNBs must also be known by the LBS system. The timing must also be known by the UEs to facilitate the search for the reference symbols. The accurate relative timing information may be obtained by:

Asynchronous mode – Each eNB is connected to a local GPS receiver to time stamp its own transmissions. The eNB only measures its own time and it does not use GPS as a frame synchronization source.
Local synchronized mode – Each eNB is connected to a local GPS receiver and uses GPS to align the eNB frames in the eUTRAN network.
Remote synchronized mode – The eNB is connected to a remote clock synchronization source via a network time protocol (NTP) or a precise time protocol (PTP). The synchronization signals are transmitted over the transmission network to all eNB.

The uncertainty of the position measurement is network-implementation dependent. The uncertainty of the position information is dependent on the method used, the position of the UE within the coverage area, and the activity of the UE. Several design options of the E-UTRAN system (e.g., size of cell, adaptive antenna technique, path loss estimation, timing accuracy, eNode B surveys) allow the network operator to choose a suitable and cost-effective UE positioning method for their market. The uncertainty may vary between networks as well as from one area within a network to another, based on the clutter type. The uncertainty may be hundreds of meters in some areas and only a few meters in others. In the event that a particular position measurement is provided through a UE-assisted process, the uncertainty may also depend on the capabilities of the UE. In some jurisdictions, there is a regulatory requirement for location service accuracy that is part of an emergency service .

A sample regulatory requirement for LBS accuracy is 300m for 90% percentile and 150m for 65% percentile. These values are an average accuracy requirement for a network. The accuracy for each clutter will be different due to the inter-site distance. Therefore, with dense urban and urban clutters the accuracy is expected to be better than the values mentioned above, while with suburban and rural, it will be degraded below these values.

There are many different possible uses for the positioning information. The positioning functions may be used internally by the EPS, by value-added network services, by the UE itself or through the network, and by “third party” services. It may also be used by an emergency service (which may be mandated or “value-added”), but the location service is not exclusively for emergencies.

Data Flow Across LTE Protocol Layers

2015-02-08T22:05:00.002+03:00

The LTE (long term evolution) air interface provides connectivity between the user equipment (UE) and the eNB (eNodeB). It is split into a control plane and a user plane. Among the two control plane signalings, the first is provided by the access stratum (AS) and carries signaling between the UE and the eNB. The second carries non-access stratum (NAS) signaling messages between the UE and the MME (mobility management entity), which is piggybacked into an RRC (radio resource control) message. The user plane delivers the IP (Internet protocol) packets to and from the EPC (evolved packet core), the S-GW (serving gateway), and the PDN-GW (packet data network gateway).

The structure of the lower layer protocols for the control and user planes in AS are the same. Both planes utilize the protocols of PDCP (packet data convergence protocol), RLC (radio link control), and MAC (medium access control), as well as the PHY (physical layer) for the transmission of the signaling and data packets.

The figure below, illustrates the radio interface protocol stack. The protocol stacks reside in both the UE and the E-UTRAN (evolved universal terrestrial radio access network).

And exactly how data flow across these layers?

HSDPA Data Flow

The figure besides illustrates an example of the data flowing on the downlink HSDPA from the application layer to the PHY layer. In this simplified figure, the data are coming from application layer maps into RLC packets. After headers are added and segmentation of the IP packets is performed, the RNC sends the data into the MAC layer. The MAC maps one or more RLC PDUs into a HARQ process.

Each MAC PDU in a HARQ process is sent over the HSDPA channel HS-PDSCH. HS-SCCH informs the UE of the control information of this transmission with user-specific H-RNTI.

Once the UE decodes the HS-PDSCH transmission correctly, based on the CRC attached in the TB, it sends HS-DPCCH ACK alongside the CQI to indicate the channel conditions. NodeB uses this feedback to decide on the size of the packets to send. NodeB retransmits any TB on an HARQ process that failed HS-PDSCH CRC, when it receives NACK from the UE. Any data not recovered in the HARQ process, can then be recovered at the RLC layer by detecting any holes in the PDUs’ SN.

LTE Data Flow

The figure illustrates an example of the data flowing on the downlink LTE from the application layer to the PHY layer.

In this simplified figure, the data come from application layer maps into the PDCP SDUs for ciphering and then into RLC packets. The RLC adds headers and segments the PDCP SDUs into RLC PDUs. The MAC maps one or more RLC PDUs into a HARQ process, depending on the CQI received from the UE. Each MAC SDU in a HARQ process is sent over the PDSCH channel. The PDCCH informs the UE of the control information (DCI) of this scheduling instance with a user-specific C-RNTI.

Once the UE decodes the PDSCH transmission correctly, it sends the PUCCH or PUSCH ACK alongside the CQI and other MIMO-related channel information. The eNB uses this feedback to decide on the size of the packets. When the eNB receives NACK from the UE on a particular HARQ, a retransmission is performed on the same HARQ process to recover the data first at lower layers. If the lower layer is unable to decode the data on the HARQ level, the RLC can then request a retransmission of the RLC PDUs as a new transmission on the lower layer. The UE sends the successfully decoded packets to the upper layer for processing.

Challenges and Solutions in Prototyping 5G Radio Access Network

2014-12-12T13:38:00.001+03:00

Breakthroughs in wireless networks will drive commerce and enhance society in entirely new and unexpected ways. A key component of the wireless future will be the widespread deployment of 5G wireless networks.

The primary goals of 5G are to support a 1,000-fold gain in capacity, connections for at least 100 billion devices, and 10Gb/s delivered to individual users. Additionally, these new networks will be capable of providing mass low-latency connectivity between people, machines, and devices. Deployment of 5G networks is expected to commence in 2020. 5G radio access will be built using evolved existing wireless radio access technologies (RAT) such as LTE and WiFi combined with entirely new technologies.

The whitepaper herein below address the Challenges and Solutions in Prototyping 5G Radio Access Network

A DYNAMIC GRAPH OPTIMIZATION FRAMEWORK FOR MULTIHOP DEVICE-TO-DEVICE COMMUNICATION UNDERLAYING CELLULAR NETWORKS

2014-12-08T18:37:00.000+03:00

With emerging demands for local area and popular content sharing services, multihop device-to-device communication is conceived as a vital component of next-generation cellular networks to improve spectral reuse, bring hop gains, and enhance system capacity. Ripening these benefits depends on fundamentally understanding its potential performance impacts and efficiently solving several main technical problems.

Aiming to establish a new paradigm for the analysis and design of multihop D2D communications,

in this article, we propose a dynamic graph optimization framework that enables the modeling of large-scale systems with multiple D2D pairs and node mobility patterns. By inherently modeling the main technological problems for multihop D2D communications, this framework benefits investigation of theoretical performance limits and studying the optimal system design. Furthermore, these achievable benefits are demonstrated by examples of simulations under a realistic multihop D2D communication underlaying cellular network.

GET FURTHER INSIGHT ON THE FRAMEWORK THE SLIDES BELOW.

How Mobile is Enabling Tech to Outgrow the Tech Industry

2014-12-05T19:06:00.001+03:00

Android devices are still the driving force across the global smartphone market, according to the International Data Corporation. Total smartphone shipments are set to reach 1.3 billion units this year with Android accounting for over 80 percent compared to just under 14 percent for iOS.

From a revenue perspective, Apple’s premium smartphones control 30 percent of global revenue while Android’s more layered approach will afford it just under 67 percent.

Is mobile eating the world?

Check out Benedict Evans' presentation on the future of mobile (which happens also to be the future of tech).

How Mobile is Enabling Tech to Outgrow the Tech Industry from Andreessen Horowitz on Vimeo.

Bringing Network Function Virtualization to LTE

2014-12-02T17:37:00.001+03:00

The mobile telecommunications industry is at the verge of a unique business crossroads. The growing gap between capacity and demand is an urgent call for new approaches and alternative network technologies to enable mobile operators to achieve more with less.

Today, mobile broadband data is growing at an annual rate of 40-50 percent per year in the U.S. and other regions globally. Mobile service providers address these rapidly expanding traffic volumes through deployment of additional network functions, which will be a significant capital expenditure (CAPEX) challenge. The nature of that mobile broadband data traffic is also evolving with new services including new video applications, connected cars and the Internet of Things (IoT). This rapid capacity growth and increasing traffic diversity in LTE networks stresses the assumptions of existing network architectures and operational paradigms.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) provides a new path that can increase the flexibility required by mobile service providers and network operators to adapt and accommodate this dynamic market environment. NFV is a new operational approach applying well-known virtualization technologies to create a physical Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) distributed platform for the delivery of end-to-end services in the context of the demanding environment of telecom network infrastructure and applications. Much of the terminology of NFV used today originated from the initial European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI) white paper titled, Network Functions Virtualisation – Introductory White Paper . GET MORE INSIGHTS FROM THE PRESENTATION------->

bringing network virtualization to LTE from Alex wanda

Creating a Digital 6th Sense with LTE Direct

2014-08-12T10:52:00.003+03:00

LTE Direct is an innovative device-to-device proximal discovery technology that can be efficiently integrated with LTE Advanced services and networks. It is defined as part of the global 3GPP standard, as a feature in Release 12. LTE Direct will make users aware of what’s happening around them at all times, effortlessly and privately, changing how people socialize and interact with people and things.

An interesting presentation from Qualcomm. read on.............................

Creating a Digital 6th Sense with LTE Direct from Qualcomm Wireless Evolution

Requirements, Challenges, and Technologies for 5G of Terrestrial Mobile Telecommunication

2014-07-21T16:18:00.002+03:00

In this article, a summary of the 5G mobile communication requirements and challenges is provided. First, essential requirements for 5G are pointed out, including higher traffic volume, indoor or hotspot traffic, and spectrum, energy, and cost efficiency. Along with these changes of requirements, a potential step change for the evolution toward 5G, which shows that macro-local coexisting and coordinating paths will replace one macro-dominated path as in 4G and before is presented.

A discussion on emerging technologies for 5G within international mobile telecommunications is given. Challenges and directions in hardware, including integrated circuits and passive components, are also discussed. Finally, a whole picture for the evolution to 5G is predicted and presented.

Find the article below;

5g challenges from Alex wanda

Mobile Data and the World Cup - An InfoGraphics

2014-07-16T15:23:00.000+03:00

Mobile connectivity has not only dramatically transformed the way we communicate; it has also given us the ability to keep track of up-to-the-minute news and updates on everything that’s going on in the world—take the World Cup for example. See this infographics below;

Data Soars as Players Score: Mobile Data and the World Cup - An infographic by the team at 4G Americas World Cup Infographic

The Impact of SPDY on mobile broadband ecosystem and value added services (VAS)

2014-06-25T11:41:00.001+03:00

The growing rate of encryption, especially SPDY-encrypted Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over mobile wireless networks, has both immediate and long-term impacts on the mobile broadband ecosystem and wireless technology architectures. As the rate of encryption grows, Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) are forced to rethink their service offerings and value proposition, how they manage capacity and customer experience and how value-added services will be impacted.

The term SPDY, pronounced “speedy”, was established and trademarked by Google and is not an acronym. It was developed as an open networking protocol for transporting web content. SPDY encapsulates multiple HTTP flows in a TLS header, with particular goals of reducing web page load latency and improving web security. SPDY achieves reduced latency through HTTP header compression, stream multiplexing, and request prioritization. As of July 2012, the group developing SPDY has stated publicly that it is working toward standardization (internet draft).

The first draft of HTTP 2.0 is using SPDY as the working base for its specification draft and editing. Implementations of SPDY exist in Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Amazon Silk and Internet Explorer and will be included in the Safari release accompanying Apple's OS X Yosemite.

This paper provides insights from 4G Americas about the Impact of SPDY on mobile broadband ecosystem and value added services (VAS)

Spdy impact on_mbb_ecosystem_and_vas_june2014 from Alex wanda

The Role of Small Cells, Coordinated Multipoint, and Massive MIMO in 5G

2014-06-06T17:13:00.002+03:00

5G will have to support a multitude of new applications with a wide variety of requirements, including higher peak and user data rates, reduced latency, enhanced indoor coverage, increased number of devices, and so on. The expected traffic growth in 10 or more years from now can be satisfied by the combined use of more spectrum, higher spectral efficiency, and densification of cells. The focus of the present article is on advanced techniques for higher spectral efficiency and improved coverage for cell edge users. A smart combination of small cells, joint transmission coordinated multipoint (JT CoMP), and massive MIMO to enhance the spectral efficiency with affordable complexity is proposed.

A review of recent achievements in the transition from theoretical to practical concepts and note future research directions is proposed. Its show in measurements with macro-plus-smallcell scenarios that spectral efficiency can be improved by flexible clustering and efficient user selection, and that adaptive feedback compression is beneficial to reduce the overhead significantly. READ FURTHER;

5g role of small cells from Alex wanda

Scenarios for 5G Mobile and Wireless Communications: The Vision of the METIS Project

2014-06-04T22:11:00.002+03:00

METIS is the EU flagship 5G project with the objective of laying the foundation for 5G systems and building consensus prior to standardization. The METIS overall approach toward 5G builds on the evolution of existing technologies complemented by new radio concepts that are designed to meet the new and challenging requirements of use cases today’s radio access networks cannot support.

The integration of these new radio concepts, such as massive MIMO, ultra dense networks, moving networks, and device-to-device, ultra reliable, and massive machine communications, will allow 5G to support the expected increase in mobile data volume while broadening the range of application domains that mobile communications can support beyond 2020. In this article, scenarios are identified for the purpose of driving the 5G research direction. Get further insights from the presentation below;

Metis project the 5 g framework from Alex wanda

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Some InfoGraphics - Why Facebook had to go after WhatsApp

2014-02-20T23:44:00.002+03:00

When Facebook announced that it would pay a total of $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, many were astouned by the price. Considering WhatsApp's huge and immensely engaged user base though, $19 billion doesn't seem as much anymore. Here are stats from statista.com That could justify this.. look below;

And the mobile messaging startup WhatsApp continues to stand strong in the face of competition from some of the largest players in the communications industry.................... see below;

And the WhatsApp Deal Dwarfs Other High-Profile Tech Acquisitions.............

And mobile accounts for More Than Half of Facebook's Ad Revenue....................

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4G Mobile Broadband Evolution: 3GPP Release 11 & Release 12 and Beyond

2014-02-13T01:12:00.002+03:00

At the grassroots level, this confidence may be attributed to the careful science of technology standards developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The standards work by 3GPP, the foundation of the world’s mobile broadband infrastructure, is delivering international communications technologies to the masses via the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) family of technologies, which is interchangeably called the 3GPP family of technologies as they are based on the evolution of standards developed for GSM, Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), HSPA+, Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced.

It may be helpful to consider the historical development of the 3GPP UMTS standards. Beginning with the inception of UMTS in 1995, UMTS was first standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in January 1998 in Release 99 (Rel-99). This first release of the Third Generation (3G) specifications was essentially a consolidation of the underlying GSM specifications and the development of the new Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). The foundations were laid for future high-speed traffic transfer in both circuit-switched and packet-switched modes. The first commercial launch (Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access (FOMA), a derivation of UMTS) was by Japan's NTT DoCoMo in 2001.

In April 2001, a follow up release to Rel-99 was standardized in 3GPP, termed Release 4 (Rel-4), which provided minor improvements of the UMTS transport, radio interface and architecture.

This presentation (from 4gamericas.org) provides good insights into the 4G Mobile Broadband Evolution:

4 g mobile broadband evolution rel 11 rel 12 and beyond feb 2014 - final from Alex wanda

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Mobile Internet: Some interesting statistics (Infographics)

2014-02-12T00:41:00.000+03:00

Mobile internet access continues to become more and more common across the globe. Ericsson predicts that the number of mobile internet subscriptions via smartphone, tablet or any other device with a cellular connection will grow from 2.2 billion this year to 6.4 billion by 2019. inforgraphics from statista.com

And Asia-Pacific Leads the World in Mobile Traffic Consumption.......

The way we use mobile phones has changed significantly over the past few years. Since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, more and more online activities have have gradually been shifted to smartphones, leading to ever-growing mobile data consumption.

Mobile phone users from the Asia-Pacific region have the highest data needs on average. They consume an average of 1.1 gigabytes per month, with half of them using more than 336 megabytes.

The lowest data consumption can be observed in Africa, where the average mobile phone user consumes just 21MB of data per month. The explanation for this is quite straight forward, as smartphone penetration is much lower in Africa than in other parts of the world. While many Africans use their mobile phones to perform financial transactions, most of them still rely on feature phones which consume very little data.

And how about Global Smartphone Traffic?.............

Global smartphone data traffic is set to explode in the next few years. According to Ericsson's most recent mobility report, global smartphone traffic is set to grow from 1 exabyte per month this year to around 10 exabyte in 2019.

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