Showing posts with label Qualcomm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Qualcomm. Show all posts

Monday 19 March 2012

Vuforia™: Qualcomm's Augmented Reality (AR) Platform

As I mentioned yesterday, while some people think that Augmented Reality is losing its charm, Qualcomm certainly thinks that things are looking up for AR and it can only get better. They have branded their AR platform as Vuforia. A recent presentation from Cambridge Wireless event is embedded below:


There are some interesting video's on Augmented Reality using the Vuforia platform on Youtube. Some of them as follows:












All presentations from the CW event are available here.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Proximity-based Services (ProSe) - New Study Item in 3GPP Rel-12


There is a new Rel-12 WI "Study on Proximity-based Services" with Qualcomm being the main proponent of this. This was earlier known as D2D (Device-to-device). From the 3GPP SP-110638:

Justification: Proximity-based applications and services represent a recent and enormous socio-technological trend. The principle of these applications is to discover instances of the applications running in devices that are within proximity of each other, and ultimately also exchange application-related data. In parallel, there is interest in proximity-based discovery and communications in the public safety community.


Current 3GPP specification are only partially suited for such needs, since all such traffic and signalling would have to be routed in the network, thus impacting their performance and adding un-necessary load in the network. These current limitations are also an obstacle to the creation of even more advanced proximity-based applications.


In this context, 3GPP technology, has the opportunity to become the platform of choice to enable proximity-based discovery and communication between devices, and promote a vast array of future and more advanced proximity-based applications.


Objective: The objective is to study use cases and identify potential requirements for an operator network controlled discovery and communications between devices that are in proximity, under continuous network control, and are under a 3GPP network coverage, for:
1. Commercial/social use
2. Network offloading
3. Public Safety
4. Integration of current infrastructure services, to assure the consistency of the user experience including reachability and mobility aspects
Additionally, the study item will study use cases and identify potential requirements for
5. Public Safety, in case of absence of EUTRAN coverage (subject to regional regulation and operator policy, and limited to specific public-safety designated frequency bands and terminals)


Use cases and service requirements will be studied including network operator control, authentication, authorization, accounting and regulatory aspects.


The study does not apply to GERAN or UTRAN.

In the past I have mentioned about Qualcomm's proprietary Flashlinq technology that seems to contain lots of similarities. There is also this AllJoyn technology that Qualcomm has been showing off since MWC. Here is a video of that:



There is a lot of potential of this proximity marketing technology mostly for marketing purposes and games. In the end it would depend of the Apps, services and charging based around this. There is also a big possibility for TV and VoD services where you start watching something on your device but then transfer it onto a TV or just a bigger screen.

Monday 14 November 2011

Overcapacity or Capacity Crunch?

A Qualcomm presentation from not too long back:
And another report from the UMTS Forum that is suggesting that the data traffic will grow 67 times from 2010 to 2020, summary embedded below:

Then I came across this interesting discussion on Twitter and a blog post by Dean Bubley in Disruptive Wireless blog.

Overcapacity has been summarised in few words as: Overcooked forecasts + WiFi offload + optimisation + LTE + more spectrum + caps/tiers + well-designed apps

In the blog post Dean's mentioned about the falling data usage that has been reported by O2. I would strongly recommend reading it.

From the network point of view, I think overcapacity is better for the time being as we are prepared for the short term future. In the long run, new devices and innovative apps may suddenly start driving up the data demand again and hopefully by that time we have sorted out some more of the capacity crunch issues.

What do you think?

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Redirection, Reselection, Handovers and other Inter-RAT combinations in LTE


Another one from Qualcomm's 4G World presentation. You can see the number of scenarios that would have to be taken into account for; this was one of the reasons I believed SVLTE may be a good choice.

Related posts:


Tuesday 8 November 2011

Devices may require support for over 40 RF Bands to be used universally


Interesting picture from Qualcomm presentation in 4G World that shows that for Universal use, a device may have to support over 40 RF bands (which may not be physically possible and may also be overly expensive)

Related posts:


Sunday 4 September 2011

HSPA+ Advanced - Enhancements beyond R10

Looks like Qualcomm is becoming my favourite company as the last few blog posts have been based on their documents and presentations. This one is a continuation of the last post on Multipoint HSPA.

Related post: HSPA evolution – beyond 3GPP Release 10 - Ericsson

Friday 2 September 2011

Multipoint HSDPA / HSPA

The following is from 3GPP TR 25.872 - Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; HSDPA Multipoint Transmission:

HSPA based mobile internet offerings are becoming very popular and data usage is increasing rapidly. Consequently, HSPA has begun to be deployed on more than one transmit antenna or more than one carrier. As an example, the single cell downlink MIMO (MIMO-Physical layer) feature was introduced in Release 7. This feature allowed a NodeB to transmit two transport blocks to a single UE from the same cell on a pair of transmit antennas thus improving data rates at high geometries and providing a beamforming advantage to the UE in low geometry conditions. Subsequently, in Release-8 and Release-9, the dual cell HSDPA (DC-HSDPA) and dual band DC-HSDPA features were introduced. Both these features allow the NodeB to serve one or more users by simultaneous operation of HSDPA on two different carrier frequencies in two geographically overlapping cells, thus improving the user experience across the entire cell coverage area. In Release 10 these concepts were extended so that simultaneous transmissions to a single UE could occur from four cells (4C-HSDPA).

When a UE falls into the softer or soft handover coverage region of two cells on the same carrier frequency, it would be beneficial for the non-serving cell to be able to schedule packets to this UE and thereby improving this particular user’s experience, especially when the non-serving cell is partially loaded. MultiPoint HSDPA allows two cells to transmit packets to the same UE, providing improved user experience and system load balancing. MultiPoint HSDPA can operate on one or two frequencies.

Click to enlarge

There is also an interesting Qualcomm Whitepaper on related topic that is available to view and download here. The following is from that whitepaper:

The simplest form of Multipoint HSPA, Single Frequency Dual Cell HSPA (SFDC-HSPA), can be seen as an extension to the existing DC-HSPA feature. While DC-HSPA allows scheduling of two independent transport blocks to the mobile device (UE) from one sector on two frequency carriers, SFDC-HSPA allows scheduling of two independent transport blocks to the UE from two different sectors on the same carrier. In other words, it allows for a primary and a secondary serving cell to simultaneously send different data to the UE. Therefore, the major difference between SFDC-HSPA and DC-HSPA operation is that the secondary transport block is scheduled to the UE from a different sector on the same frequency as the primary transport block. The UE also needs to have receive diversity (type 3i) to suppress interference from the other cell as it will receive data on the same frequecny from multiple serving cells.Figure 1 llustrates the high-level concept of SFDC-HSPA.

In the case where the two sectors involved in Multipoint HSPA transmission belong to the same NodeB (Intra-NodeB mode), as illustrated in Figure 2, there is only one transmission queue maintained at the NodeB and the RNC. The queue management and RLC layer operation is essentially the same as for DC-HSPA.

In the case where the two sectors belong to different NodeBs (Inter-NodeB mode), as illustrated in Figure 2, there is a separate transmission queue at each NodeB. RLC layer enhancements are needed at the RNC along with enhanced flow control on the Iub interface between RNC and NodeB in order to support Multipoint HSPA operation across NodeBs. These enhancements are discussed in more detail in Section 4. In both modes, combined feedback information (CQI and HARQ-ACK/ NAK) needs to be sent on the uplink for both data streams received from the serving cells. On the uplink, the UE sends CQIs seen on all sectors using the legacy channel structure, with timing aligned to the primary serving cell.

When two carriers are available in the network, there is an additional degree of freedom in the frequency domain. Dual Frequency Dual Cell HSPA (DFDC-HSPA) allows exploiting both frequency and spatial domains by scheduling two independent transport blocks to the UE from two different sectors on two different frequency carriers. For a DC-HSPA capable UE, this is equivalent to having independent serving cells on the two frequency carriers. In Figure 3, UE1 is in DC-HSPA mode, whereas UE2 is in DFDC-HSPA mode.

Dual Frequency Four-Cell HSPA (DF4C-HSPA) can be seen as a natural extension of DFDC-HSPA, suitable for networks with UEs having four receiver chains. DF4C-HSPA allows use of the four receiver chains by scheduling four independent transport blocks to the UE from two different sectors on two different frequency carriers. DF4C-HSPA is illustrated in Figure 4.

Like SFDC-HSPA; DFDC-HSPA and DF4C-HSPA can also be intra-NodeB or inter-NodeB, resulting in an impact on transmission queue management, Iub flow control and the RLC layer.

Advantages of Multipoint transmission:
* Cell Edge Performance Improvement
* Load balancing across sectors and frequency carriers
* Leveraging RRU and distributed NodeB technology

Multipoint HSPA improves the performance of cell edge users and helps balance the load disparity across neighboring cells. It leverages advanced receiver technology already available in mobile devices compatible with Release 8 and beyond to achieve this. The system impact of Multipoint HSPA on the network side is primarily limited to software upgrades affecting the upper layers (RLC and RRC).


Thursday 1 September 2011

Device to Device communication (FlashLinQ?)

Recently I read on twitter that Qualcomm has asked 3GPP to do a study on device to device communication. Sometime back I blogged about FlashLinQ, Qualcomm's proprietary P2P communication technology. I am not sure if Qualcomm is pushing for this one or wants to have a study in general. If you know more details please add as comments.

Meanwhile, I found this video that explains what FlashLinQ does:



And there is also this presentation which is less technical and explains the information in the video.

More technically detailed presentation embedded in my earlier blog post here.

Wednesday 31 August 2011

Ultra Self Organising Networks (UltraSON)

While watching the Femtocell Video, I was a bit curious on what exactly UltraSON does, so I decided trying to find more info. Surprisingly the information was hard to come by. I finally managed to find the Qualcomm site that has more details but surprisingly it wasnt east to find. From the website (link at bottom):

Qualcomm femtocell R&D program is focused on developing self organizing network features to address interference and mobility management for femtocell deployment in residential and enterprise environments. Interference and mobility management is a chief concern especially when operators are planning for high levels of perfromace from dense and an unplanned femtocell deployments. Qualcomm has developed UltraSON™, a comprehensive suite of interference and mobility management techniques for femtocell deployments in residential and enterprises.

The techniques that make UltraSON:


More details on UltraSON at : http://www.qualcomm.com/research/femtocells

Interesting promotional Femtocell video by Qualcomm

Wednesday 24 August 2011

LTE Advanced HetNet Benefits!

Presentation from Qualcomm Webinar, LTE-Advanced Hetnet benefits.


Qualcomm is undisputed leader in the LTE chipsets and have been pushing hard for the next generation LTE-A chipsets. Here is a promotional LTE-Advanced Video on Youtube:

Saturday 13 August 2011

Friday 1 July 2011

Summary of 'The Future of Wireless International Conference' #fwic

Here is a summary of the Future of Wireless International conference held in Cambridge on the 27th and 28th of June 2011. The summary is a compilation of my notes with the tweets sent using the #FWIC tag.

DAY 1

Roberto di Pietro, VP Product Marketing and Business Development, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies
• 26 million 3G connections being added every month
• 226% growth is seen in smartphones from 2010 - 2014
• Mobile as a single platform for developers.
• Devices smart enough to know which network to connect to
• Qualcomm arrived on the scene 6 months after everyone but they are the only ones with 4G, 3G and 2G multi-mode chips
• In 2012 they would be releasing the new System Architecture with Single / Dual / Quad cores upto 2.5GHz (Snapdragon next gen)
• Question: Will smartphones die in the future when people move to tablets for everything except for voice/sms and they get simpler phones for that
• Answer: Smartphones will co-exist as companion devices with the tablets and will continue growing for a while.
• In other discussions: QoS will be a big differentiator and offloading would certainly be needed. Femtocells are going to form part of any strategy.
• Network signaling load and need for developers to improve apps design noted in qualcomm keynote here in cambridge


Mr. BongGoon Kwak, Senior Vice President, The head of Mobile Business Fast Incubation Business Department Mobile Business Group in Korea Telecom.
• KT adding 0.5 million users every month.
• Mobile data predicted to grow 26 fold by 2015 (6.2 exabytes/month)
• E = MC^2. Where E = evolution, M = mobile and C = connectivity
• mobile banking users in Korea increased 100% to 18 million due to smartphones
• smartphone ARPU up 32% on feature phone
• KakaoTalk (http://www.kakao.com/talk/en) users have increased which has in turn reduced the SMS ARPU
• NaaS (Network as a Service) is a new trend

Mr. Edward Zhou, CMO of Western European Region, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
• states they have 5300 people in Europe but only 65% are from local market
• No. 2 telecom solution provider with revenues of $28 billion
• has 110,000+ employees with 150 nationalities worldwide, more than half work in R&D
• By 2020 there will be 5.5B MBB (Mobile Broadband) users as opposed to 1.5B FBB (Fixed Broadband)
• 70% of companies (especially SMEs) will be using cloud based services.


Mr. R. Swaminathan, Senior Executive Vice President, Reliance Communications Ltd.
• Low cost mobile networks and devices helped drive innovation in low cost business models in Rural India
• Customisation is a mecessity for the rural market.
• One offering includes a fixed phone that uses Mobile as a backhual using the Yagi antenna
• 15 operators in rural India. Voice tariff went from 20cents to 1 cent. Entry cost reduced by 95%
• ARPU in rural India is $2.
• Telecom operators have done innovations to keep costs to minimum
• Phone to tablet is best evolution for Indian rural market, using visual images and txt to speech technologies not smartphones
• Good to have some text to voice and vice-versa apps
• Ends with saying that there are 870 million people in rural India and possible market size is $25 billion that can be exploited


Kanwar Chadha, Chief Marketing Officer and Board Member of Cambridge Silicon Radio
• Innovations in location-aware wire-free connected world
• Spoke on view of local business vs global, very entertaining perspective , assume nothing and be careful of interpretation
• Example is the initial GPS cost $3700 but was still successful in Japan because guys wanted to show it off to their dates.
• Maslow's hierarchy of needs dont work for India as its more important to have entertainment (TV) than roof.
• FM very succesful in India but nowhere else.
• Sat Navs will not succeed in India because addresses and maps not very well mapped. Things like coupons, sms will be very successful


Innovation Hothouse: Mr. Christian Leicher, Member of the Executive Board at Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG.


Session on start-ups very interesting
• Augmentra talked of GPS based smartphone apps. Users can share and get paid when someone else download what they share. Their guidebooks, etc are trusted by half the search and rescue mountain teams
• Oxems have a solution for the new plastic pipes that are being deployed. The normal metal detectors cant detect these pipes so they have a RFID based solution.
• Pneumacare has a non-contact medicare solution that can be used to track people with respiratory problems
• MagicSolver.com has a unique app discovery solution that can reach upto 6 millions users in 90 different countries.
• Cambridge temperature concepts has a solution that can increase the chances of fertility without IVF to the same levels after 6 months use.


Interesting points from the breakout sessions:
• Mike Bowerman of Alcatel-Lucent: Soon we will see pricing based on time of day, location, etc. Infrastructure sharing lower costs but it means that coverage from some location can completely vanish.
• John frieslaar of Huawei talks about how many will be connected to networks and the cause of demand
• Stephen temple says industry must spur innovation not gov.agree but will gov let us?
• 75% of UK mobile data consumption is driven by BBC iplayer, YouTube and adult videos says Sam Leinhardt of Penthera
• Ed Candy, 3: Apps evolving from Handset Apps to Widgets to Intelligent Browsers based
• Content is king but context is queen
• O2 in UK started putting data caps and lost 7K customers in London. They were using 7% of network capacity so O2 happy to get rid of them


DAY 2
Stephen Baily, General Manager, BBC R&D
• BBC R&D iPlayer usage on tablets is 3million/mth 2% of total
• Dual screens being explored by BBC with a universal controller API. The proposal has been submitted to W3C.
• Working on Dual-Screen concept where iPad becomes a complimentary device to TV (See http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/40584/bbc-focused-ipad-dual-screen)
• BBC R&D iPlayer usage on tablets is 3million/mth 2% of total
• BBC is looking again at mobile broadcasting based on DVB-t2m standard
• 90% of broadcast os normal schedule than the time shifted one.

Dr. Tapani Ryhänen, Laboratory Director, heading Eurolab (Cambridge and Lausanne) of Nokia Research Centre
• Imagining tomorrow devices, creating technology today
• Morph concept video



• Nokia Research Center in Cambridge working in lots of futuristic technologies like Data driven Apps, Stretchable electronics, Bend to zoom, flexible phone and display
• Another video that I wasnt able to locate on Youtube


Few points from The "Can big wireless deliver on the promise of a big society?" Panel Debate
• Motorola's David Chater-Lea: "Due to spectrum needs we're going to see breakdown of barriers between commercial & private networks"
• Neul/Ofcom's William Webb: "To get a truely wireless society we need more small cells and increased backhaul. Then we need FTTH"
• Otherwise we're going to have situation where wireless will be held back by the wired network
• Public safety: should governments use private networks or commercial networks & give priority to emergency services over customers?



Graham Fisher, Former CEO of Orange Labs R&D, BathCube:
• Net neutrality doesn't work in a world of finite resources
• High end phones expectaions include screens that can work in sunlight, AR, 3D, etc.
• When it comes to retail price plans mobile operators are all in a bargain basement, they need to reintroduce value

Dan Reed, Corporate Vice President, Technology Policy and Strategy and eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft
• The uber change happening is collision of computing/comms/content. We need to work out how to work together


Ken Blakeslee, Chairman of WebMobility Ventures:
• Digital natives vs digital immigrants
• Is mobile too inward looking?
• We're moving from hardware to software driven marketplace where communities are the new currency
• Users can be bought and bribed, communities can not


Interesting Obervation:
• Cambridge Wireless - run largely by women as an organisation but 95% of attendees at Future of Wireless conf #fwic are male


Poll of #fwic audience returns 50:50 re: whether mobile infrastructure should be common wholesale solution vs competitive between operators

Hopefully you have enjoyed this summary!

Wednesday 29 June 2011

Some Pictures from 'The Future of Wireless International Conference' #FWIC

Here are some of the pics from 'The Future of Wireless International Conference' held in Cambridge. Most of the pics are from me using my old BB but some of the pics are crowdsourced from twitter from other attendees.

1. The Marquee where exhibition was held


2. Impressive Small-cells from Picochip







3. Freescale

4. Antenova

5. Qualcomm
Qualcomm was showing their Augmented Reality demo (see this). Finally got to play the game after seeing it on Youtube for such a long time.


6. Steepest Ascent.
I have to agree that WindFi is a really good name.

7. Aeroflex

8. A presentation where Ed-Candy from '3' is speaking

9. Omnisense


10. Arkessa

11. From presentations via Tweets




12. This is the impressive hall of St. John's college in Cambridge (via Nabeel Mardi)


Saturday 18 June 2011

Benefit of 1.4GHz for Mobile Downlink

Significant benefits could flow from use of 1.4 GHz band for a supplemental mobile downlink for enhanced multi-media and broadband services, according to a study by Plum Consulting conducted for Ericsson and Qualcomm.

The study by Plum Consulting shows that using the 1.4 GHz band (i.e. 1452-1492 MHz also called 1.5 GHz by the European Parliament or the L-band by the CEPT) for terrestrial supplemental mobile downlink could generate a net present value for Europe of as much as EUR54 billion over a 10 year period.

The band is currently allocated for use by digital audio broadcasting (DAB) services in most European countries -- part of the band is allocated to terrestrial networks and part is allocated to satellite networks. None of these services have developed in the band. Rather in all countries in Europe the satellite part of the band is unused and this is also the case in the terrestrial component in most countries.

There could be up to eight times as much data being downloaded than is being uploaded in mobile networks. This imbalance is expected to grow, as rich mobile content is increasingly made available and as consumer demand continues to soar. The study found that the use of the 1.4 GHz band as a supplemental downlink band for mobile applications is shown to drastically ease capacity, to enable considerably higher user data rates, to substantially enhance the user experience and to provide significant economic benefits.


The value of releasing the 1.4 GHz band depends on whether other substitute spectrum may become available in the next 5 to 10 years. Starting from today, all countries in Europe have planned or are planning to release the 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands in the next two years. There is equipment available for use in both bands and services are already deployed in some countries.

Which other bands might be released over the next 10-15 years? Table 3-2 gives a number of candidate bands, ordered by the likely timing for release, including the 1.4 GHz band for completeness. In each case, we summarise the current status of the band, initiatives that suggest it might be a candidate for future release and our views on the possible timing of deployment based on the difficulty of clearing the band and the harmonisation/standardisation initiatives that would need to be undertaken before equipment would be mass produced for the band.

The white paper is embedded below for reference: