Very interesting to see how we use Smartphones in our everyday lives
Thursday, 30 August 2012
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
KT: Cloud Communication Center for managing Data Explosion
Interesting presentation from Korea Telecom in the LTE World Summit that argues that to manage the data explosion
Sunday, 26 August 2012
Voice-Over-LTE (VoLTE) Signalling
MetroPCS has recently launched rolled out VoLTE in USA using LG connect phones. More operators would be rolling it out soon so here is example of Signaling in VoLTE.
To read in detail, please see the article from NTT Docomo technical journal here.
To read in detail, please see the article from NTT Docomo technical journal here.
Saturday, 25 August 2012
Who do users blame for poor QoE when using mobile devices
An important reminder for mobile phone manufacturers as well as mobile operators.
Monday, 20 August 2012
Thursday, 16 August 2012
3GPP SA1 Release 11 Standardisation Trends
An Interesting article from the NTT Docomo technical journal:
Related posts:
Related posts:
- Non-Voice Emergency Services (NOVES)
- Network Improvements for Machine Type Communications (NIMTC)
- Evolution of Machine Type Communications (MTC)
- 3GPP Release-12 and beyond
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
QoS Strategies for IMS & VoLTE
Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Providing a Superior level of QoS through Femto/Small Cell deployment
Monday, 13 August 2012
A Twitter discussion on eMBMS
@zahidtg: Samsung has demoed eMBMS using Anritsu RTD system - http://bit.ly/PCGb99 - But is any operator interested?
Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung has successfully demonstrated the clear delivery of television broadcast signals over an LTE 4G wireless network.
Samsung is using evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology and has tapped test & measurement specialist Anritsu's Rapid Test Designer (RTD) and MD8430A to simulate the LTE network environment used for the demonstration.
eMBMS technology allows carriers to adjust coverage and capacity as needed, allowing for more efficient use of network resources in order to better handle the heavy traffic load that broadcast video would present.
Samsung is actively looking to add more content to the value proposition for its phones. It has deployed its own Hub strategy for its Galaxy line of smartphones, which includes a Music Hub, Movies Hub and Games Hub, all of which give the handset-maker a new incremental revenue stream. A TV Hub that could support live TV content in addition to on-demand episode downloads could add a compelling new wrinkle in that pseudo-walled garden approach.
Samsung is also instrumental in bringing mobile TV to market via the Dyle initiative for mobile DTV—a service that offers live broadcast feeds from local TV affiliates over separate, dedicated broadcast spectrum. No. 5 U.S. wireless carrier MetroPCS just went live with Dyle service and a Samsung mobile DTV-compatible smartphone.
@KimKLarsen: Depends on whether an operator believes in the broadcast over mobile model. Mobile User trends seems not in favor at least in WEU.
@zahidtg: I agree and thats why I dont think broadcast will work in the short term. Would be different is Apple were to create biz model:)
@KimKLarsen: though the question is whether they (Apple/Google) really need eMBMS for executing such a business model ... I guess not really?!
@KimKLarsen: I have a couple of beautiful white papers on satellite (w & wo terrestrial component) eMBMS using S-band together w Apple or Google
@zahidtg: True. My point is that they are the ones who can create a new biz model on it, operators cant be bothered. Too much hassle.
@KimKLarsen: too much hassle, too little new revenue, risky ROI, insufficient scale, etc.. an Apple or alike might overcome due to shear scale!
@KimKLarsen: though w a satellite (w. city based terrestrial component) based eMBMS system you cover large landmass & pop & get the Scale!
@Qualcomm_Tech: I think the best initial use case for #eMBMS is to selectivley use it as venue casting at stadiums/exhibitons etc.
@kitkilgour: "ClipCasting" has been the main eMBMS use case - stadia, or catching up on your 1min news at stations
@Qualcomm_Tech: True, Any content destined to venue users, incl. live/real-time can leverage eMBMS- huge capacity increase
@KimKLarsen: I agree! Might be interesting! But can this really justify eMBMS as a service for mass adaption?
@KimKLarsen: when will eMBMS be supported in Gobi? & when can we expect this to be standard in all LTE terminal devices?
@kitkilgour: It's networks as well as devices. MBMS has always been hampered by needing to reach the cell edge ...
@kitkilgour: ... with limited / no power control whilst minimising interference to others
@KimKLarsen: great feedback! Thanks! Do you see a need for denser networks to deliver a uniform MBMS service than for standard data services?
@KimKLarsen: one of the challenges we have had in nominal terrestrial MBMS designs have been link budget requirements! Any good sources?
@Qualcomm_Tech: challenge’s been having enough penetration of multicast devices. Venue cast solves that problem #1000x
@KimKLarsen: Sounds like Venue Cast is The Main Driver for eMBMS adoptation? (hmmm?) What's the Revenue Source? #42x
@KimKLarsen: I don't understand how Venue Cast can Drive MC Device Uptake? The other way around more reasonable! #42x
@Qualcomm_Tech: Target specific groups, eg season ticket holders & offer attractive device/content/plan bundles #1000x
Participants:
@zahidtg = Zahid Ghadialy
@KimKLarsen = Dr. Kim Larsen
@Qualcomm_Tech = Qualcomm_Tech
@kitkilgour = Kit Kilgour
In other news, Huawei Launches eMBMS Innovation Center to Develop LTE Solutions:
Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced the launch of an enhanced Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) innovation center in Shenzhen in order to develop end-to-end eMBMS solutions and LTE applications.
eMBMS is a 3GPP R9 standard for mobile video that enables a higher transfer capacity over typical MBMS technologies. Huawei's eMBMS innovation center will focus on on-demand video services and broadcast information based on eMBMS. This will enrich LTE applications and accelerate the development of the eMBMS industry chain, which includes chipsets, devices, and network equipment.
In addition to developing solutions, the innovation center will also serve as an experience center for operators. Video, mobile TV, and advertisements will be showcased via mobile smart devices employing Huawei's eMBMS solution. Global operators from Europe, Asia, the South Pacific and other regions have already visited the center to experience its LTE demonstrations.
Huawei has been committed to the growing mobile video market since 2006. According to the Global mobile Supplier Association's (GSA) “Mobile Broadband Status Report”, over four billion people watch videos on YouTube every day. This large-scale usage is leading to increased revenue. According to a report from Global Industry Analysts, revenue from the mobile video market will reach USD30 billion by 2017. Huawei's eMBMS research team works closely with operators, chipset and device manufactures and other partners to further the development of the industry for the benefit of all end users.
Huawei's LTE division has been committed to providing the best commercially performing network, the best end user experience through devices and innovative services, as well as end-to-end convergent solutions for helping operators with their business success. Huawei's eMBMS innovation center will push the development of mobile video well into the future.
Sunday, 12 August 2012
LTE, LTE-A and Testing
Some months back R&S held a technical forum where there were many interesting talks and presentations. They have now uploaded video of all these presentations that can be viewed on their website (no embedding allowed).
Available to be viewed here.
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Monday, 6 August 2012
LTE KPI's (Key Performance Indicators)
Key Performance Indicators of KPI's are indicators for if a device or equipment meets a certain reliability criteria for being ready for deployment.
In [1] the following KPI's are defined
• Accessibility
• Retainability
• Integrity
• Availability
• Mobility
[2] gives the requirements related to the above KPI's. Take for instance Accessibility, [2] defines the requirements as follows:
Business level requirements: If an end user cannot access a service it is hard to charge for the service. Also, if it happens often that an end-user cannot access the provided service, the end-user might change wireless subscription provider, i.e. loss of income for the network operator. Hence, to have a good accessibility of the services is important from a business point of view. This measurement assists the network operator with information about the accessibility provided to their customers.
Specification level requirements: The accessibility of an end-user application covers a wider area than just the E-UTRAN part. Hence it is important to realize that a KPI for this in E-UTRAN shall be limited to the parts that E-UTRAN has control of, i.e. the E-UTRAN KPI shall be defined so that it indicates the E-UTRAN contribution to the end-user impact, NOT attempt to take responsibility of the whole end-to-end part of service accessibility.
The service provided by E-UTRAN for this KPI shall be E-RAB. It shall be possible to measure the accessibility of E-RABs in E-UTRAN. Accessibility measurement should be available as a success rate for the attempts.
As for defining an attempt, it shall be considered an attempt first when the eNodeB can be certain that is a request for an E-RAB. As for defining a success, it shall be considered a success when the eNodeB have completed its task to setup resources and the result of the E-RAB establishment can be informed to the requester of the E-RAB. The KPI shall be available per QoS group.
Use case description: In providing end-user services to wireless end-users, the first step is to get access to the wireless service. First after access to the service has been performed, the service can be used. If an accessibility measurement is not considered OK, then the network operator can investigate which steps that are required to improve the accessibility towards their customers. This measurement should be used for observing the impact of E-UTRAN on end-users service accessibility.
From the above, we can create certain tests to test the Accessibility KPI. Example cases as follows:
1. RRC Connection Setup for Registration success rates
2. RRC Connection Setup for Services success rates
3. Initial E-RAB Setup Success rates
4. Successive E-RAB Setup Success rates
5. Call (VoIP) setup success rates
[1] 3GPP TS 32.450: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN): Definitions
[2] 3GPP TS 32.451: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN); Requirements
More example of KPI's is available from this document:
Saturday, 4 August 2012
Friday, 3 August 2012
Tech Laws we should all know about - #TechLaws
In many different events and conferences, these laws get quoted so I decided to collect them all in a place.
Moore's law: The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.
Moore's law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to Intel executive David House, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).
Gordon Moore himself predicts that Moore's Law, as applied to integrated circuits, will no longer be applicable after about 2020 - when IC geometry will be about one atom thick. However, recent technology announcements about 3-D silicon, single-atom and spin transistors gives another twenty years of conventional doublings before the electronics limit is reached. Inevitably, other technologies, such as biochips and nanotechnology will come to the forefront to move the equivalent of Moore's Law inexorably forward.
See Also: Transistor Wars: Rival architectures face off in a bid to keep Moore's Law alive
Koomey's Law: The number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This trend has been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R2 of over 98%) and has actually been somewhat faster than Moore’s law. Jonathan Koomey articulated the trend as follows: “at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half.”
See Also: See Also: A New and Improved Moore's Law
Metcalfe's law: Attributed to Robert Metcalfe, originator of Ethernet and founder of 3COM: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes; so, as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows exponentially, while the cost per user remains the same or even reduces.
Within the context of social networks, many, including Metcalfe himself, have proposed modified models using (n × log n) proportionality rather than n2 proportionality.
See Also: Wikipedia
Gilder's Law: proposed by George Gilder, prolific author and prophet of the new technology age - the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months (some refer to the period as eighteen months). New developments seem to confirm that bandwidth availability will continue to expand at a rate that supports Gilder's Law.
See Also: Technology Needs for 40G–100G Network-Centric Operations & Warfare
Nielsen's Law: Network connection speeds for high-end home users would increase 50% per year, or double every 21 months. As a corollary, he noted that, since this growth rate is slower than that predicted by Moore's Law of processor power, user experience would remain bandwidth-bound.
Cooper's Law:
Cooper has found that the ability to transmit different radio communications at one time and in the same place has grown with the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi's first transmissions in 1895. The number of such communications being theoretically possible has doubled every 30 months, from then, for 104 years. This fact has been dubbed Cooper's Law.
See Also: ArrayComm: Cooper’s Law
Edholm's Law of Bandwidth: Edholm sets out three categories of communications – wired, wireless and nomadic. Nomadic is a form of wireless where the communicator is stationary during the period of communications. According to Edholm’s Law, data rates for these three telecommunications categories increase on similar exponential curves, the slower rates trailing the faster ones by a predictable time lag.
The chart above shows data rates plotted logarithmically against time. When drawn like this, it is possible to fit straight lines to each of the categories. The lines are almost parallel, although nomadic and wireless technologies gradually converge at around 2030. For example, in 2000 2G delivered around 10kbits/s, W-LANs connected to dial up delivered 56kbits/s, and the typical office local area network (LAN) provided 10Mbits/s. Today, 3G delivers 100kbits/s, a home wireless LAN with DSL or cable broadband access is about 1Mb/s and typical office LAN data rates are 100 Mbits/s. Edholm’s Law predicts that in 2010 3G wireless will deliver 1 Mbits/s, Wi-Fi connected via a faster backhaul 10 Mbits/s, and office networks 1Gbit/s.
Edholm’s Law overlaps with Guilder’s on the fixed bandwidth side and to some degree with Cooper’s on the wireless side. But perhaps key is its prediction that wired and wireless will maintain a near-constant differential in data rate terms.
Shannon's law (Shannon–Hartley theorem): In information theory, the Shannon–Hartley theorem tells the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.
Considering all possible multi-level and multi-phase encoding techniques, the Shannon–Hartley theorem states the channel capacity C, meaning the theoretical tightest upper bound on the information rate (excluding error correcting codes) of clean (or arbitrarily low bit error rate) data that can be sent with a given average signal power S through an analog communication channel subject to additive white Gaussian noise of power N, is:
where
C is the channel capacity in bits per second;
B is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz (passband bandwidth in case of a modulated signal);
S is the average received signal power over the bandwidth (in case of a modulated signal, often denoted C, i.e. modulated carrier), measured in watts (or volts squared);
N is the average noise or interference power over the bandwidth, measured in watts (or volts squared); and
S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the communication signal to the Gaussian noise interference expressed as a linear power ratio (not as logarithmic decibels).
Finally,
Murphy's Law: Anything that can possibly go wrong, does
Further reading:
Please feel free to add any others you may know of in the comments and if they are popular I will add them in the blog post.
Moore's law: The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.
Gordon Moore himself predicts that Moore's Law, as applied to integrated circuits, will no longer be applicable after about 2020 - when IC geometry will be about one atom thick. However, recent technology announcements about 3-D silicon, single-atom and spin transistors gives another twenty years of conventional doublings before the electronics limit is reached. Inevitably, other technologies, such as biochips and nanotechnology will come to the forefront to move the equivalent of Moore's Law inexorably forward.
See Also: Transistor Wars: Rival architectures face off in a bid to keep Moore's Law alive
Koomey's Law: The number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This trend has been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R2 of over 98%) and has actually been somewhat faster than Moore’s law. Jonathan Koomey articulated the trend as follows: “at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half.”
See Also: See Also: A New and Improved Moore's Law
Metcalfe's law: Attributed to Robert Metcalfe, originator of Ethernet and founder of 3COM: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes; so, as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows exponentially, while the cost per user remains the same or even reduces.
Within the context of social networks, many, including Metcalfe himself, have proposed modified models using (n × log n) proportionality rather than n2 proportionality.
See Also: Wikipedia
Gilder's Law: proposed by George Gilder, prolific author and prophet of the new technology age - the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months (some refer to the period as eighteen months). New developments seem to confirm that bandwidth availability will continue to expand at a rate that supports Gilder's Law.
See Also: Technology Needs for 40G–100G Network-Centric Operations & Warfare
Nielsen's Law: Network connection speeds for high-end home users would increase 50% per year, or double every 21 months. As a corollary, he noted that, since this growth rate is slower than that predicted by Moore's Law of processor power, user experience would remain bandwidth-bound.
Cooper's Law:
Cooper has found that the ability to transmit different radio communications at one time and in the same place has grown with the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi's first transmissions in 1895. The number of such communications being theoretically possible has doubled every 30 months, from then, for 104 years. This fact has been dubbed Cooper's Law.
See Also: ArrayComm: Cooper’s Law
Edholm's Law of Bandwidth: Edholm sets out three categories of communications – wired, wireless and nomadic. Nomadic is a form of wireless where the communicator is stationary during the period of communications. According to Edholm’s Law, data rates for these three telecommunications categories increase on similar exponential curves, the slower rates trailing the faster ones by a predictable time lag.
The chart above shows data rates plotted logarithmically against time. When drawn like this, it is possible to fit straight lines to each of the categories. The lines are almost parallel, although nomadic and wireless technologies gradually converge at around 2030. For example, in 2000 2G delivered around 10kbits/s, W-LANs connected to dial up delivered 56kbits/s, and the typical office local area network (LAN) provided 10Mbits/s. Today, 3G delivers 100kbits/s, a home wireless LAN with DSL or cable broadband access is about 1Mb/s and typical office LAN data rates are 100 Mbits/s. Edholm’s Law predicts that in 2010 3G wireless will deliver 1 Mbits/s, Wi-Fi connected via a faster backhaul 10 Mbits/s, and office networks 1Gbit/s.
Edholm’s Law overlaps with Guilder’s on the fixed bandwidth side and to some degree with Cooper’s on the wireless side. But perhaps key is its prediction that wired and wireless will maintain a near-constant differential in data rate terms.
Shannon's law (Shannon–Hartley theorem): In information theory, the Shannon–Hartley theorem tells the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.
Considering all possible multi-level and multi-phase encoding techniques, the Shannon–Hartley theorem states the channel capacity C, meaning the theoretical tightest upper bound on the information rate (excluding error correcting codes) of clean (or arbitrarily low bit error rate) data that can be sent with a given average signal power S through an analog communication channel subject to additive white Gaussian noise of power N, is:
where
C is the channel capacity in bits per second;
B is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz (passband bandwidth in case of a modulated signal);
S is the average received signal power over the bandwidth (in case of a modulated signal, often denoted C, i.e. modulated carrier), measured in watts (or volts squared);
N is the average noise or interference power over the bandwidth, measured in watts (or volts squared); and
S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the communication signal to the Gaussian noise interference expressed as a linear power ratio (not as logarithmic decibels).
Finally,
Murphy's Law: Anything that can possibly go wrong, does
Further reading:
- Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
- Ten Laws Of The Modern World
- Wireless Communications to 2020 and Beyond - William Webb
- Wright's Law Edges Out Moore's Law in Predicting Technology Development - IEEE Spectrum
- Laying down the law - Professor William Webb, IEE Communications Engineer, February/March 2006
Please feel free to add any others you may know of in the comments and if they are popular I will add them in the blog post.
Thursday, 2 August 2012
The Scent Phone
When I spoke about the 'next killer device', I showed this picture below and mentioned that smell is an area that has a lot of potential but difficult to exploit.
In the Future of Wireless conference, one of the talks that many people were keen to listen about was about this 'scent phone'. Presentation embedded below:
I have also blogged about the same topic before that can be seen here.
If you are interested in these topics, see also: