Release 12 study item on Continuity of Data Sessions to Local Networks (CSN)

LIPA was defined as part of Release-10 that I have already blogged about. Imagine the situation where a user started accessing local network while camped on the Home eNode B (aka Femtocell) but then moved to the macro network but still wants to continue using the local network. Release 12 defines this feature and is called Continuity of Data Sessions to Local Networks (CSN). This study item was originally part of Release 11 but has now been moved to Rel-12.

From SP-100885:

Justification

Basic functionality for Local IP Access (LIPA) has been specified in Rel-10.

LIPA signifies the capability of a UE to obtain access to a local residential/enterprise IP network (subsequently called a local network) that is connected to one or more H(e)NBs.

The current study item investigates extending LIPA functionality to allow access to the local network when a UE is under coverage of the macro network and provide related mobility support.

LIPA allows a UE to work with devices in the local network – e.g. printers, video cameras, or a local web-server. If the local network offers services that enable exchange of digital content (e.g. UPnP) LIPA allows the UE to discover supporting devices and to be discovered.

Examples for services that become available by LIPA are:

·         The pictures stored in a UE’s digital camera may be uploaded to a local networked storage device or printed out at a local printer.

·         A portable audio player in the UE may fetch new content from a media centre available on the local network.

·         A UE may receive video streams from local surveillance cameras in the home.

·         A local web-server in a company’s intranet may be accessed by the UE.

·         Support of VPN.

LIPA does not require the local network to be connected to the Internet but achieves IP connectivity with the UE through one or more H(e)NBs of the mobile operator.

In Release 10  3GPP has only specified the support of LIPA when the UE accesses the local network via H(e)NB.

On the other hand an operator may, e.g. as a chargeable user service, wish to provide access to the local network also to a UE that is under coverage of the macro network. Access to the local network when a UE is under coverage of the macro network should be enabled in Rel-11.

In Rel-10 it had been required for a UE to be able to maintain IP connectivity to the local network when moving between H(e)NBs within the same local network.

However, access to the local network may be lost as a UE moves out of H(e)NB coverage into the macro network, even if other services (e.g. telephony, data services, SIPTO) survive a handover to the macro network and are continued. This may result in an unsatisfactory user experience.

The current study item will allow continuation of data sessions to the local network when the UE moves between H(e)NB and the macro network.

Therefore, in Rel-11, the 3GPP system requires additional functionality to allow

·         A UE to access the local network from the macro network

·         A UE to maintain continuity of data sessions to the local network when moving between a H(e)NB and the macro network

Objective:              to propose requirements and study feasibility for the following scenarios:

Provide a capability to the mobile operator to allow or restrict

­        Access to an enterprise/residential IP network when a UE is under coverage of the macro network, assuming that the IP address of the local IP network (e.g. residential/enterprise gateway) is available to the UE.

­        Continuity of data session(s) to an enterprise/residential IP network when a UE moves between a H(e)NB in an enterprise/residential environment and the macro network.

The support of Continuity of Data Sessions to Local Networks should be an operator option that may or may not be provided by individual PLMNs.

Service Aspects

The user should be able to decline access to the local network from the macro network. The user should also be able to decline continuity of data sessions to local networks when moving between H(e)NB and the macro network (e.g. in the case when data sessions to local networks is charged differently if accessed from macro coverage or via the H(e)NB).

A difference in QoS may be noticeable by the user when the local network is accessed from the macro network or via the H(e)NB.

ETSI INT IMS/EPC Interoperability Standardisation: Motivation, Roadmap & First Results

INT = IMS Network Testing. ETSI INT website here. More details below the presentation:

ETSI INT IMS/EPC INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDISATION

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This was presented by Giulio Maggiore, Telecom Italia, ETSI TC INT Chairman in the 2nd FOKUS FUSECO Forum 2011, Berlin 17-18 Nov. 2011

From the ETSI leaflet (note that this is quite old information but still on the ETSI website here):

IMS interoperability is a key issue for boosting IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) roll-out and more specifically network interconnection between operators. Only through thorough testing in practical scenarios can operators ensure operational excellence in a multi-vendor and multi-provider environment.


IMS comprises a set of specifications designed to enable network operators to implement IP-based networks that can carry services for both fixed and mobile customers simultaneously.


IMS was developed originally in the mobile world (specifically in the specifications created by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, 3GPP), and was adopted for fixed networks by ETSI’s TISPAN Technical Committee (Telecoms & Internet Converged Services & Protocols for Advanced Networks).


However this promise of advanced communications over the next generation network will only be delivered if those same networks can interconnect.


ETSI’s Technical Committee INT: IMS Network Testing


ETSI is bridging the existing gap between 3GPP IMS Core Network standards and the initial industry IMS implementations through the organization of IMS interoperability events in connection with ETSI’s Centre for Testing & Interoperability (CTI) and Plugtests™ interoperability testing service.


Our Technical Committee for IMS Network Testing (TC INT) is actively establishing close contact with a number of industry fora and organizations dealing with IMS interoperability, including 3GPP, GSMA, MSF (Multi Service Forum), IMS Forum and the ITU-T. TC INT develops IMS test specification according to conformance, network integration and interoperability testing methodologies. Other ongoing work includes development of tests for Supplementary Services based on regulatory requirements and IMS tests with legacy networks (e.g. SIP-I).


ETSI has already held two IMS interoperability events. The first examined interconnection aspects of 3GPP IMS Release 6, including such issues as basic call on the Mw interface. The second event had a wider scope that included the testing of 3GPP IMS Release 7 interworking, roaming, border control, and integration of application servers executing selected Multimedia Telephony supplementary services.


Future ETSI activities and events will go even deeper towards bridging 3GPP IMS standards and industry implementations. These will include the organization of further IMS interoperability events designed to boost the roll-out and take-off of IMS services and operators’ network interconnections.

AT&T on Distributed Antenna System (DAS)

From the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November 2011, Dallas, Texas, USA

More about DAS on Wikipedia here.

AT&T comparing In-Building Solutions

Gemalto presentation on Soft SIM

Will a Soft SIM Change Everything?

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How Mobile Broadband users use their data allowance

Interesting picture of what MBB users use their data allowance on. Interesting to see that Social Networking is far popular in the North America whereas Real-time entertainment is much more popular in APAC. It is understandable that the downstream Real-time entertainment would contain of VOD services like Youtube and Hulu but not sure what Upstream would consist of. 

US Trends and Updates on Mobile Broadband, VoIP and Mobile Service Status

Presentations From the 2nd FOKUS FUSECO Forum 2011, Berlin 17-18 Nov. 2011

Mobile Service Status and Trends in the US

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Mobile Broadband and VoIP in the US: Trends and Updates

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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.

A Golden Next-Gen Hetrogeneous Device

From the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November 2011, Dallas, Texas, USA
Presented by Joe Lawrence, Vice President, CDMA Development Group (CDG)

UE Antenna Sizes on different frequencies

The biggest problem with Antennas for mobiles and now the tablets have been how to arrange antennas for MIMO since the wavelength needs to be λ/4. The picture gives an idea how the antenna size changes with different frequencies. Higher frequencies are better for having multiple antennas as their length and the distance between then decreases.

From a presentation by Shirook M. Ali, RIM in the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November
2011, Dallas, Texas, USA.

Dilbert Humour: '8G' instead of '4G'

Source: Dilbert

See Also: Dilbert Humour: So why is it called 4G?

Mobile standards & synchronization - Interesting presentation from Ericsson

Mobile standards & synchronization: 3GPP, etc.

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Mobile Video is more than 50% of the data traffic

With the popularity of video streaming, its no surprise that video is already more than 50% of the data traffic flowing through the network.

Reducing CSFB Timing with RRC R9 Optimisations

While in the initial testing CSFB timing used to be between 6-8 seconds, most Rel-8 phones can complete the CSFB procedure between 4-4.5 seconds. Unfortunately this is still a lot in terms of signalling. To reduce this in Rel-9 there is a simple optimisation that has been done.

In the RRC Connection Release message, there is a possibility to add UTRAN/GERAN System Information messages. In the picture above, I have only shown UTRA System Information but a similar picture can be drawn for GERAN.

Once all the Mandatory SIB's are sent to the UE then it can immediately camp on without the need to read any other additional system info. This will reduce the CSFB time between 1-2 seconds.

The lesser the CSFB time, the better the Quality of end user experience

Nice Pie Chart on different Android Devices

Click to enlarge

I guess Pie charts like these can convey more information then writing about the percentages of devices sold. Maybe we should use them more often to represent information.

Source: From a presentation by Deutsche Bank in the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November 2011, Dallas, Texas, USA

Quick update on LTE Release 11 Work and Study Items

LTE Release 11 Work and Study Items

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Nice work by Nomor. Available to download from here.

Dilbert Humour: Smartphone Interface Rage

Source: Dilbert

LTE Capacity Analysis

From the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November 2011, Dallas, Texas, USA
Presented by Bill Ingram, Cricket Communications, November 8, 2011

Smart Metering for Dummies

Smart Metering for Dummies LOGICA

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De-risking the Broadband Business Model

Outlook 2012: De-risking the Broadband Business Model

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From the Outlook 2012 (#io2012) on Nov. 24th 2011

Secure Wi-Fi for Large Scale Events and Arenas

Interesting presentation from Logica on Secure WiFi. The resolution of this presentation is low for security reasons as well, I guess.

Secure Wi-Fi for Large Scale Events and Arenas

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To download this presentation and other presentation from the recent event, click here.

HSDPA multiflow data transmission

From RP-111375:

HSPA based mobile internet offerings are becoming very popular and data usage is increasing rapidly. As a result, HSPA has begun to be deployed on more than one transmit antenna and/or on 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.

When a UE falls into the softer or soft handover coverage region of two cells on the same carrier frequency, the link from the serving HS-DSCH cell is capacity or coverage limited and the non-serving cell in its active set has available resources, it would be beneficial to schedule packets to this UE also from the non-serving cell and thereby improve this particular user’s experience.

From 4G Americas whitepaper:

One family of such schemes parses the incoming data for the user into multiple (restricted to two cells in the study) data streams or flows, each of which is transmitted from a different cell [8] Concurrent transmission of data from the two cells may either be permitted or the UE may be restricted to receiving data from only one cell during a given TTI. The former type of scheme is designated an aggregation scheme while the latter is termed a switching scheme. The aggregation scheme can be seen as subsuming the switching scheme at the network when scheduling to the user is restricted to the cell with better channel quality.

Figure 14 illustrates the basic multi-flow concept with both cells operating on the same carrier frequency F1.

3GPP studied different multipoint transmission options for HSDPA and documented the findings and performance gains in TR25.872 providing feasibility and performance justification for the specification work.

For more details also see:
http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/FeatureOrStudyItemFile-530034.htm

See also old blog post on Multipoint HSDPA/HSPA here.

Do we need Fiber?

Click on the image to view full size

From a presentation by Acreo, available here.

Interoperability between LTE FDD/TDD network

In countries where FDD and TDD are both in use, it would be interesting to see Dual-mode LTE terminals that would support both TDD and FDD and it should be possible to do a reselection as well has handovers from one mode to another.

It should be noted that the Structure of TDD and FDD frames are different as shown above.

If you are wondering why we need both FDD and TDD modes in the same geographical location, its because of Spectrum being available as well as with TDD allows possibility of different UL/DL data rates which generally means more efficient use of spectrum.

Shared Data plans anyone?

Shared plans are common in business tariffs but for some reason operators are reluctant to offer them on personal plans. With multiple devices becoming a common place, I would rather prefer to have a single plan that can be used across multiple devices rather than paying for a plan for each device.

From operator point of view, I think they would get a higher loyalty rate if they allow this as it means that if you want to change an operator, you would have to change SIM from multiple devices and some of these devices may be locked to an operator or may not work on other operators, etc.

An Infonetics Research report is embedded below:

2011 Infonetics Research - The new requirements of shared data plans

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Femtocells and Interference Management

Also see earlier post on Ultra SON here.

Overcapacity or Capacity Crunch?

A Qualcomm presentation from not too long back:

How to meet data demand?

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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:

Summary of report: Mobile traffic forecasts 2010-2020

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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?

Another concept phone from Nokia called 'HumanForm'

Description as follows:

HumanForm was created in a joint effort between Nokia Design and Nokia Research Center to translate the most promising new nanotechnologies into meaningful user experience, prototype those for decision making; and transfer and set aspiration for future portfolio.

Project is a key to bring significant user experience benefits to the market thereby creating mindshare and value share through nanotechnology enabled experiences.

HumanForm is a visionary solution for a dynamically flexible device beyond touch screen and voice communication where technology is invisible and intuition takes over. Natural interactions are enabled with kinetic user interface.

HumanForm concept and a follow-up Nokia Kinetic Device prototype were launched in Nokia World 2011.

To learn more, visit: http://research.nokia.com/

2nd Workshop by 3GPP and Broadband Forum

3GPP and Broadband Forum held another joint session recently. Here is the summary from that event (3BF-11046.zip)

All presentations and documents from that event is available to download and view here.

Video on the Vision of the Future

I came across couple of videos recently on how User Interface for the future is going to be different than what we are used to. Its already getting changed as we get used to the touch screens and gesture recognition. Here is the first video that came out couple of weeks back and has already had over 2 million hits:

There is a whole blog post dedicated to this which you may be interested in, available here.

Another one is on the gesture recognition that will probably make big on the future devices including TVs.

On a lighter note, the future generation would probably just take the touch and gesture recognition for granted. Here is one such video:

LTE for Mobile Consumer Devices

LTE for Mobile Consumer Devices

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From the 2nd ETSI M2M Workshop, Oct. 2011. All presentations available here.

Related posts:

• 6th ETSI Security Workshop
• 1st ETSI M2M Workshop summary and conclusions

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:

• Recap of Handover procedures in LTE
• LTE to 3G Handover Procedure and Signalling
• HeNBs (Femtocells) and eNBs Handovers
• Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SR-VCC)

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:

• A global analysis of LTE spectrum requirements and business models
• LTE Spectrum Strategies and Forecasts to 2016
• Global survey of the Status of LTE Ecosystem

Ericsson Video: Networked Society 'On the Brink'

In On The Brink we discuss the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today's 'dumb society' are brought up and discussed.

Three quick 3GPP Videos

Balazs Bertenyi, Dealing with the data explosion: Speaking about how 3GPP manages Releases and giving details of some of the key LTE features and some new work on the horizon.

Andrew Howell, GERAN and LTE Interworking: Andrew Howell, 3GPP GERAN Chairman, gives some background on the work of the GSM/EDGE RAN groups, including GELTE and the impact of machine type communications over legacy networks in the LTE age.


See also my earlier post on GELTE here.

Atle Monrad is Chairman of the 3GPP Core Network and Terminals group. In this short film, he explains the role of the protocol groups and gives a snap shot of the latest priorities for his group.

If you want to learn more about 3GPP, see earlier blog post here.

Femto as a Service (FaaS)

The following is from a recent Small Cells conference, presented by Colt Telecom.

Femtocell service prototyping

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I wanted to highlight the Femto as a Service (FaaS) concept as I think that this may be the way forward in future. Since multiple people have phones and devices from multiple operators and it would not be possible to have Femtocells from different operators, this may be an easy solution.

I am not exactly sure about what Spectrum would be used but I guess a better case could also have been that the Fixed operator has its own spectrum that it can use and a single Femto would allow any operator's device to connect. The Femto Core can route the call to the correct mobile operator so there would be no need for multiple femtos in a house.

RRC Signalling in Rel-10 for MDT

Last year I wrote about Minimization of Drive Testing (MDT) and mentioned about the possibility of enhancements. Now looking at the new RRC specs I can see a new message LoggedMeasurementsConfiguration has been added,

When the UE is in RRC_CONNECTED mode, this message can be sent and the UE be informed about the measurements to be performed. The message contents are as follows:

LoggedMeasurementConfiguration-r10 ::= SEQUENCE {

criticalExtensions CHOICE {

c1 CHOICE {

loggedMeasurementConfiguration-r10 LoggedMeasurementConfiguration-r10-IEs,

spare3 NULL, spare2 NULL, spare1 NULL

},

criticalExtensionsFuture SEQUENCE {}

}

}

LoggedMeasurementConfiguration-r10-IEs ::= SEQUENCE {

traceReference-r10 TraceReference-r10,

traceRecordingSessionRef-r10 OCTET STRING (SIZE (2)),

tce-Id-r10 OCTET STRING (SIZE (1)),

absoluteTimeInfo-r10 AbsoluteTimeInfo-r10,

areaConfiguration-r10 AreaConfiguration-r10 OPTIONAL, -- Need OR

loggingDuration-r10 LoggingDuration-r10,

loggingInterval-r10 LoggingInterval-r10,

nonCriticalExtension SEQUENCE {} OPTIONAL -- Need OP

}

Once the UE has done the measurements, it can inform the network in one of the following messages, RRCConnectionSetupComplete, RRCConnectionReestablishmentComplete, RRCConnectionReconfigurationComplete and UEInformationResponse that it has the required information available. This is done by including the following new Enum:

logMeasAvailable-r10 ENUMERATED {true} OPTIONAL,

Finally, the network can request the logged Measurements information in the UE Information Request Message. The new fields for that are:


UEInformationRequest-v1020-IEs ::= SEQUENCE {
logMeasReportReq-r10 ENUMERATED {true} OPTIONAL,
nonCriticalExtension SEQUENCE {} OPTIONAL
}

The UE would send the following information in the response message:

LogMeasInfo-r10 ::= SEQUENCE {
locationInfo-r10 LocationInfo-r10 OPTIONAL,
relativeTimeStamp-r10 INTEGER (0..7200),
servCellIdentity-r10 CellGlobalIdEUTRA,
measResultServCell-r10 SEQUENCE {
rsrpResult-r10 RSRP-Range,
rsrqResult-r10 RSRQ-Range
},
measResultNeighCells-r10 SEQUENCE {
measResultListEUTRA-r10 MeasResultList2EUTRA-r9 OPTIONAL,
measResultListUTRA-r10 MeasResultList2UTRA-r9 OPTIONAL,
measResultListGERAN-r10 MeasResultList2GERAN-r10 OPTIONAL,
measResultListCDMA2000-r10 MeasResultList2CDMA2000-r9 OPTIONAL
} OPTIONAL,
...
}


MeasResultList2GERAN-r10 ::= SEQUENCE (SIZE (1..maxCellListGERAN)) OF MeasResultListGERAN


LocationInfo-r10 ::= SEQUENCE {
locationCoordinates-r10 CHOICE {
ellipsoid-Point-r10 OCTET STRING,
ellipsoidPointWithAltitude-r10 OCTET STRING,
...
},
horizontalVelocity-r10 OCTET STRING OPTIONAL,
gnss-TOD-msec-r10 OCTET STRING OPTIONAL,
...
}

Phones with Flexible Screens in 2012

From PC World:

Samsung Electronics said Friday that it is aiming to launch mobile phones with flexible displays next year, with tablets and other portable devices to have these displays soon after.

The company said it was aiming to follow on the success of its Galaxy S II smartphone, which has now sold 10 million units in five months.

The comments came as the company discussed its earnings for the three-month period through September. Samsung said its overall profit fell 23 percent from a year ago to 3.44 trillion Korean won (US$3.1 billion), dragged down by its chip and display operations, but operating profit at its mobile unit more than doubled in the period.

"The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part," said spokesman Robert Yi during an earnings call. "The application probably will start from the handset side."

Yi said tablets and other mobile devices with flexible displays would follow.

Samsung has shown flexible OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays inside rigid cases that kept the screens curved. The technology has material within each pixel that generates light, making it perhaps more suitable for flexible screens than LCDs, which would require both a flexible screen and a backlight.

This is a Video from CES 2011 in January:

I like this concept of bendy phones. The following Nokia video shows how this could really be useful.

Toshiba shows something similar at SID 2010.

News via WebProNews.

'Twisted Radio Waves': Could they be the way out of Spectrum Crunch?

A recent infograph from PCMag.com, summarises the Spectrum Crunch that we may be facing soon. Though in reality its not as bad as it may seem initially, we still have to find a way out of this. Carrier Aggregation can only help to a certain extent as we still need spectrum to do the aggregation.

The following is from a recent article in discover magazine:

Italian astrophysicist Fabrizio Tamburini says a solution may lie in making better use of the frequencies already in use. In a recent paper, he demonstrated a potential way to squeeze 100 times more bandwidth out of existing frequencies.

The idea is to twist radio waves like corkscrews and create multiple subfrequencies, distinguished by their degree of twistedness. Each subchannel carries discrete data sets. “You can tune the wave with a given frequency as you normally do, but there is also a fingerprint left by the twist,” Tamburini says. He and Swedish colleague Bo Thidé hit upon the approach while studying waves warped by the immense gravity of black holes. This past June, the scientists set up a custom dish in Venice and successfully broadcast video encoded in both twisted and normal radio waves across St. Mark’s Basin. (Note this type of wave-twisting is fundamentally different from the better-known circular polarization of light.)

The next step is to design small, cheap smartphone antennas that can transmit and receive the warped signals. If the industry’s appetite for bandwidth is any indication, it may not be long before twisted-radio technology shows up in your new gadgets.

If you are a Physics buff, you can check the paper out here.

The picture above is from Wikipedia section on Light orbital angular momentum.

Femtocell Backhaul Options

Any others?

There is also this interesting presentation from Maravedis on Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) backhaul, embedded below:

Maravedis@4Gworld, Backhaul summit, NLOS session

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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:

The Evolution of HSPA

View more documents from All About 4G

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