Showing posts with label White Papers and Reports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label White Papers and Reports. Show all posts

Friday 12 April 2013

Myths and Challenges in Future Wireless Access



Interesting article from the recent IEEE Comsoc magazine. Table 1 on page 5 is an interesting comparison of how different players reach the magical '1000x' capacity increase. Even though Huawei shows 100x, which may be more realistic, the industry is sticking with the 1000x figure. 

Qualcomm is touting a similar 1000x figure as I showed in a post earlier here.

Thursday 31 January 2013

Tuesday 8 January 2013

VoLTE, Battery Issues and Solutions


Sometime back we had news about how VoLTE is battery killer and how it would suck our 4G phones dry. Well, I agree. I am no fan of VoLTE and think that CSFB solution can suffice in mid-term. Having said that, there is a solution which would be soon available to sort this battery issue during VoLTE call. I had a post on this topic earlier titled SPS and TTI Bundling. I am not sure about exactly how much saving would occur if either of the features are implemented.

ST Ericsson has recently released a whitepaper on this topic that is embedded below. If you have more idea on this, please add it in comments.



Thursday 20 December 2012

IMS Whitepapers from Spirent



Couple of old but interesting whitepapers from Spirent available, in case you are interesting in IMS. Available to download from here (registration required)

Related blog posts:



Sunday 18 November 2012

Quick Introduction to LTE-Advanced

An article written by me for the Mobile Europe magazine where I try and explain LTE-A without going in technical details. This also includes the state of market on who is doing what.


Friday 26 October 2012

Developing and Integrating a High Performance HetNet

I have seen on Twitter some people think that HetNets (Heterogeneous Networks) is just a new name for the Hierarchical Cell Structures (HCS). The main difference between then is that while HCS requires all layers to have different frequencies, HetNets can use the same or the different frequency. In case the same frequency is used, there needs to be a way to manage interference between the different layers. In fact the term 'layers' is hardly used with HetNets as there is nothing strictly hierarchical with different types of cells that co-exist in a HetNet. Typically a HetNet comprises of Macro cells, Micro/Pico cells, other Small Cells (including Femtocells) and WiFi as well (if used to offload traffic).

This recent whitepaper from 4G Americas is an excellent source to understand more about HetNets



Available to download from Slideshare here.

Monday 27 February 2012

Voice over HSPA (VoHSPA) and CS over HSPA (CSoHS)


4G Americas has recently released a whitepaper entitled, "Delivering voice over HSPA". This paper describes the technological features that are being developed to make Voice over HSPA (VoHSPA) a reality. It describes the two potential options for VoHSPA. The first option leverages IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology developed in conjunction with Long Term Evolution (LTE), and is referred to as IMS Voice over HSPA or simply IMS Voice. The other option delivers voice by modifying existing circuit-switch based techniques so that those communications can be transmitted over an HSPA infrastructure, and is referred to as CS Voice over HSPA (CSoHS). Both the options are shown in the picture above. Note that there is no discussion about Over the top (OTT) type voice services like Skype, etc. 

The chief among benefits anticipated from VoHSPA are increases in the spectral efficiency of mobile networks. With these new techniques, voice calls can be delivered more efficiently from a spectral standpoint over Packet Switched (PS) rather than Circuit Switched (CS) networks freeing up radio resources for additional data traffic.


The 4G Americas report defines work completed by the GSMA for a minimum mandatory set of features defined in existing 3GPP Release 8 specifications (IR 58: IMS Profile for VoHSPA) that should be implemented in order to insure an interoperable, high quality, IMS-based telephony service over an HSPA radio access layer. In the white paper, 4G Americas recommends additional features, above the minimum mandatory features in IR 58, for VoHSPA either under an IMS or a CS approach, in order to minimize packet losses and variations in packet arrival times that can impair the quality of voice communications.

The whitepaper is available to download from here.

Monday 16 January 2012

HSPA vs LTE

Interesting report to remind the differences between HSPA and LTE available here.

Wednesday 26 October 2011

New 4G Americas whitepaper on HSPA evolution in 3GPP standards

Some forecasts put HSPA at over 3.5 billion subscribers by the end of 2016. Operators with HSPA and LTE infrastructure and users with HSPA and LTE multi-mode devices will be commonplace. There are 412 commercial deployments of HSPA in 157 countries, including 165 HSPA+ networks. Thus, with the continued deployment of LTE throughout the world, and the existing ubiquitous coverage of HSPA in the world, HSPA+ will continue to be enhanced through the 3GPP standards process to provide a seamless solution for operators as they upgrade their networks. While LTE, with 33 commercial deployments to date and over 250 commitments worldwide, will be the mobile broadband next generation technology of choice for HSPA, EV-DO, WiMAX and new wireless operators, HSPA will continue to be a pivotal technology in providing mobile broadband to subscribers.

The white paper explains that as 3GPP specifications evolve, their advanced features help to further the capabilities of today’s modern mobile broadband networks. With each release there have been improvements such as better cell edge performance, increased system efficiencies, higher peak data rates and an overall improved end-user experience. 3GPP feature evolution from Rel-7 to Rel-10 has pushed possible HSPA peak data rates from 14 Mbps to 168 Mbps. Continued enhancements in 3GPP Rel-11 will again double this capability to a possible peak data rate of 336 Mbps:
  • Rel-7: 64QAM or 2X2 MIMO => 21 or 28 Mbps
  • Rel-8: DC + 64QAM or 2X2 MIMO + 64QAM => 42 Mbps
  • Rel-9: DC + 2X2 MIMO + 64QAM => 84 Mbps
  • Rel-10: 4C + 2X2 MIMO + 64QAM => 168 Mbps
  • Rel-11: (8C or 4X4 MIMO) + 64QAM => 336 Mbps
“If operators are able to gain new additional harmonized spectrum from governments, they will no doubt deploy LTE, However, it is clear that HSPA+ technology is still exceptionally strong and will continue to provide operators with the capability to meet the exploding data usage demands of their customers in existing spectrum holdings,” Pearson said.

The paper is embedded as follows:

This paper and other similar papers are available to download from the 3G4G website here.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

HD Voice - Next step in the evolution of voice communication

Nearly 2 years back I blogged about Orange launching HD Voice via the use of AMR-WB (wideband) codecs. HD voice is already fully developed and standardized technology and has so far been deployed on 32 networks in almost as many countries.

People who have experienced HD voice say it feels like they are talking to a person in the same room. Operators derive 70 percent of their revenue from voice and voice-related services, and studies show that subscribers appreciate the personal nature of voice communication, saying it offers a familiar and emotional connection to another person.

HD voice is also a reaction to the competition faced by the operators from OTT players like Skype.

Below is an embed from the recent whitepaper by Ericsson:



For more information also see:



Wednesday 5 October 2011

Simultaneous Voice and LTE (SVLTE)


When LTE is an overlay to a CDMA/EV-DO network, the current de facto standard for voice delivery is Simultaneous Voice and LTE (SVLTE). In this arrangement, voice service is deployed as a 1x service running in parallel with LTE data services. For this solution to work, the handset needs to have two radios that are on simultaneously. The problem that is obvious is that the power consumption would generally be higher as two radios are on when the voice call is ongoing. The advantage (and I think its a big advantage) is that the data speeds are not affected by ongoing voice call and at the same time the state machine is simple.

For some reason this idea is not very popular for the 2G/3G evolution to LTE as the reliance will be on the CS Fallback. I had discussed this idea in the LTE World Summit and had blogged about it, you can read more details and comments here.

There is also a recent whitepaper from Huawei that covers these issues going towards VoLTE. Its available here.

Edit 06/10/11: Changed the acronym of SVLTE from 'Simultaneous Voice Over LTE' to 'Simultaneous Voice and LTE' as this is correct and referred to elsewhere.

Friday 30 September 2011

Macrocells or Metrocells?

Just went through Alcatel-Lucent strategic paper on whether to go for more Macrocell sites or rather have Metrocells instead.

A good description of Metrocells is available in the document:

Metro cells, the latest evolution in small cells, are based on the same low cost femtocell technology that has been successfully used in home and enterprise cells, but with enhanced capacity and coverage. With higher processing and transmit power, the first generation of metro cells is engineered to serve from 16 to 32 users and provide a coverage range from less than 100 meters in dense urban locations to several hundred meters in rural environments. However, unlike home and enterprise cells, metro cells are owned and managed by a MSP and typically used in public or open access areas to augment the capacity or coverage of a larger macro network.

Available in both indoor and outdoor versions, metro cells are plug-and-play devices that use Self-Organizing Network (SON) technology to automate network configuration and optimization, significantly reducing network planning, deployment and maintenance costs. While indoor versions use an existing broadband connection to backhaul traffic to a core network, outdoor versions may be opportunistically deployed to take advantage of existing wireline or wireless sites and backhaul infrastructure, such as Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN), Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH), Very-high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL) street cabinets, and DSL backbone.

Since metro cells use licensed spectrum and are part of the MSP’s larger mobility network, they provide the same trusted security and quality of service (QoS) as the macro network. With seamless handovers, users can roam from metro cells to the macro network and vice versa. Metro cells also deliver the same services as the macro network (for example, voice, Short Message Service (SMS), and multimedia services), and support application programming interfaces (APIs), that may be used for developing new, innovative services. In short, metro cells promise to be the ideal small cells for network offloading.

For more details on the whitepaper see: http://www.slideshare.net/zahidtg/metro-cells-whitepaper



Saturday 10 September 2011