LTE Roaming using IPX

A very interesting presentation from Raphaël Glatt of Bics in the Signalling Focus Day of LTE World Summit 2014. IPX is probably the most popular solution as its already being used by many operators for roaming agreements. Anyway, his presentation was the most detailed one I have come across and he was happy to share it with me for this blog. His complete presentation is embedded below:

Enabling Effective Roaming Through IPX from Zahid Ghadialy

AT&T on Mobile Security

Nice presentation from Ed Amoroso from AT&T outlining how the security is evolving to cope with the new technologies and threats. He points to encryption, containerization, proxy & virtualization as the four key pillars of technology for enabling operators to protect the network in a mobility era where the perimeter can no longer do the job it used to do.

Here is the video:

If you cant see the video, click on this link to watch it on Light Reading's website.

European Regulations for 'Decoupling of SIM' and 'International Roaming'

The following is an extract from an article from Capana:

From the 1st of July 2014, the new EU Roaming Regulations III will become active.

The new EU Roaming regulations set by the European Commission, will allow retail mobile customers to purchase roaming services (such as voice, SMS and data) from an Alternative Roaming Provider (ARP) separate from their domestic service provider (DSP), without affecting either mobile number or device.

The general idea behind the regulations is to promote the interests of European citizens by increase competition between European operators, provide greater transparency, reduce bill shocks, and ultimately provide a greater roaming experience and higher quality of service for consumers.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso said in a press release:

“Further substantial progress towards a European single market for telecoms is essential for Europe’s strategic interests and economic progress. For the telecoms sector itself and for citizens who are frustrated that they do not have full and fair access to internet and mobile services.”

Vice President Neelie Kroes, the Digital Agenda Commissioner responsible for package then continued in the same press release by saying:

“The legislation proposed today is great news for the future of mobile and internet in Europe. The European Commission says no to roaming premiums, yes to net neutrality, yes to investment, yes to new jobs. Fixing the telecoms sector is no longer about this one sector but about supporting the sustainable development of all sectors.”

Requirements

The process of selecting an ARP and its services while abroad within EU is more commonly known as decoupling or separate sale of roaming services. BEREC (the body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) have provided the European Commission with their recommendations of two decoupling models that should be supported; Local breakout (LBO, which is the local provisioning of data services by a visited network operator, or Single IMSI solution where the ARP acts as a reseller of the DSPs service offerings.

Decoupling using Single IMSI

With the Single IMSI solution the ARP will engage in agreements with each domestic operator providing domestic services, then the ARP will act as a reseller of these services to the roaming subscriber. This type of solution is applicable for all types of service providers such as mobile network operators, MVNOs or VSPs. From a subscriber standpoint, they will have a roaming agreement with the ARP regardless of the DSP and the DSP is required to activate services within one working day.

Decoupling using Local Breakout

The Local breakout model refers to local provisioning of data services only, where the services is provided directly on the visited network and traditional SMS and voice traffic is supplied by the home operator in traditional roaming manner. By using the 3GPP option for local breakouts, the VPMN will be able to act as ARP for internet access and other data services.

With these new regulatory changes, there is a higher demand on flexibility in billing systems. Support for more complex multi-partner business models for ARP and MVNO is necessary for both billing and financial settlement activities.

Raymond Bouwman from Rabion Consultancy did an excellent presentation last year in the LTE World Summit, here is his presentation explaining more about the EU Roaming Regulations III

The SIM and International Roaming - Decoupling of Roaming from Zahid Ghadialy

Internet Trends 2014, by Mary Meeker

Its June, time for the Internet Trends update by Mary Meeker, KPCB. Last year's update has crossed 3 million views on Slideshare. So many interesting slides, difficult to pick up some of the best ones to add here. I have selected a few that I really liked. The first being the growth in Smartphones and Tablets, as compared to PC's and Television's.

The other very interesting point to highlight is that the number of SMS's are decreasing and the number of OTT messages are rising. Just two days back, BITKOM, Germany released the news that SMS's are declining drastically in Germany. OTT's are taking over, rightly so.

Finally, with people doing too much multi-tasking, the above slide highlights what people are doing while watching TV.

Here is the complete set of slides:

KPCB: Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2014 @ July 2014 from Brian Crotty

Related news on the web:

• Forbes: Are We In A Tech Bubble? Not Really, According To Mary Meeker's Latest Report
• Business Insider: Mary Meeker's Stunning 2014 Presentation On The State Of The Web
• Quartz: Mary Meeker’s 2014 internet trends report: all the slides plus highlights
• Forbes: Mary Meeker's Web Video Love Affair
• Guardian: Mary Meeker: 2015 will be about 'findable data' and mobile sensors
• Business Insider, Australia: In 3 Big Slides, Here's Why Mary Meeker Is Optimistic About The Future Of American Healthcare
• Tech2: What Mary Meeker’s 2014 trends report says about India’s Internet usage

Case Study: RAN Sharing in Poland

The last post on Network sharing by NEC was surprisingly popular so I thought its worth doing a case study by Orange in Poland on how they successfully managed to share their network with T-Mobile. Full presentation embedded as follows:

Deployment of RAN Sharing in Poland from Zahid Ghadialy

Connected and Autonomous Car Revolution

Last week we had the Automotive and Transport SIG event in Cambridge Wireless. There is already some good writeup on that event here and here. In this post my interest in looking at the technologies discussed.

R&S (who were the sponsors) gave their introduction presentation quite well highlighting the need and approaches for the connected car. He also introduced the IEEE 802.11p to the group.

As per Wikipedia, "IEEE 802.11p is an approved amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard to add wireless access in vehicular environments (WAVE), a vehicular communication system. It defines enhancements to 802.11 (the basis of products marketed as Wi-Fi) required to support Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. This includes data exchange between high-speed vehicles and between the vehicles and the roadside infrastructure in the licensed ITS band of 5.9 GHz (5.85-5.925 GHz). IEEE 1609 is a higher layer standard based on the IEEE 802.11p."

Back in December, Dr. Paul Martin did an equally useful presentation in the Mobile Broadband SIG and his presentation is equally relevant here as he introduced the different terms live V2X, V2i, V2V, V2P, etc. I have embedded his presentation below:

Roger Lanctot from Strategy Analytics, gave us some interesting facts and figures. Being based in the US, he was able to give us the view of both US as well as Europe. According to him, “LTE is the greatest source of change in value proposition and user experience for the customer and car maker. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC and satellite connectivity are all playing a role, but LTE deployment is the biggest wave sweeping the connected car, creating opportunities for new technologies and applications.” His officially released presentation is embedded below (which is much smaller than his presentation on that day.

There were also interesting presentations that I have not embedded but other may find useful. One was from Mike Short, VP of Telefonica and the other was from Dr. Ireri Ibarra of MIRA.

The final presentation by Martin Green of Visteon highlighted some interesting discussions regarding handovers that may be required when the vehicle (and the passengers inside) is moving between different access networks. I for one believe that this will not be an issue as there may be ways to work the priorities of access networks out. Anyway, his presentation included some useful nuggets and its embedded below:

NFV and SDN - Evolution Themes and Timelines

We recently held our first Virtual Networks SIG event in Cambridge Wireless. There were some great presentations. The one by the UK operator EE summarised everything quite well. For those who are not familiar with what NFV and SDN is, I would recommend watching the video on my earlier post here.

One of the term that keeps being thrown around is 'Orchestration'. While I think I understand what it means, there is no easy way to explain it. Here are some things I found on the web that may explain it:

Orchestration means Automation, Provisioning, Coordination and Management of Physical and Virtual resources.  

Intelligent service orchestration primarily involves the principles of SDN whereby switches, routers and applications at Layer 7 can be programmed from a centralized component called the controller with intelligent decisions regarding individual flow routing in real time.

If you can provide a better definition, please do so.

There are quite a few functions and services that can be virtualised and there are some ambitious timelines.

ETSI has been working on NFV and as I recently found out (see tweet below) there may be some 3GPP standardisation activity starting soon.

@zahidtg They can for virtualised networks. There is ongoing discussion in 3GPP for service chaining, vEPC etc.
— Dimitris Mavrakis (@dmavrakis) May 16, 2014

Anyway, here is the complete presentation by EE:

Revolutionizing mobile networks with SDN and NFV from Zahid Ghadialy

There was another brilliant presentation by Huawei but the substance was more in the talk, rather than the slides. The slides are here in case you want to see and download.

Related post:

• Small Cells as a Service (SCaaS) using NFV - 3G4G Small Cells Blog

Improvement in Interference Rejection and Suppression Technology

In the last post where I talked about FeICIC I mentioned about the advanced Interference rejecting receivers, here is one very good article from NTT Docomo technical journal. The following is from this article:

Rel. 11 LTE has introduced MMSE-Interference Rejection Combining (MMSE-IRC) receivers as a mobile terminal interference rejection and suppression technology to mitigate the effects of these interference signals and increase user throughput even in areas that are recently experiencing high interference. Rel. 8 LTE receivers support MIMO transmission technology, so receivers were equipped with at least two antennas since it was first introduced. The MMSE-IRC receivers in Rel. 11 LTE, are able to use the multiple receiver antennas to create points, in the arrival direction of the interference signal, where the antenna gain drops (“nulls”) and use them to suppress the interference signal (Figure 1). The terminal orients a null toward the main interference signal, which is the signal that particularly affects the degradation of throughput, thereby improving the Signal-to-Interferenceplus-Noise power Ratio (SINR) and improving throughput performance.

However, with the original MIMO multiplexed transmission, which realized high throughput using multiple transmit and receiver antennas, the receiver antennas are used to separate the signals between layers, so interference from adjacent cells cannot be suppressed and throughput cannot be improved, particularly for mobile terminals with two receiver antennas.

On the other hand, the 3GPP has already included interference rejection and suppression technology in performance specifications for mobile terminals equipped with W-CDMA/High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) in Rel. 7 of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). With W-CDMA, receivers normally use one receiver antenna and perform Rake reception, but the effects of multipath interference degrading reception performance was an issue.

Thus, the following three receiver extensions were studied and introduced.
• Type 1/1i extends the Rake receiver to use two antennas.
• Type 2/2i extends the Rake receiver to an MMSE receiver that suppresses multipath and adjacent-cell interference.
• Type 3/3i extends the MMSE interference-suppressing receiver defined in Type 2/2i to use two receiver antennas.

The functional extensions in receivers in Rel.7 UMTS and Rel. 11 LTE are summarized in Table 1. The MMSE-IRC receivers in Rel. 11 LTE incorporate receiver algorithms that are generally equivalent to those in the Type 3/3i receivers introduced in WCDMA/HSDPA. However, in the WCDMA/HSDPA receivers they also operate to suppress inter-coding interference within a cell. There is no interference within a cell in LTE systems, so in the MMSE-IRC receivers introduced in Rel. 11 LTE, they operate to suppress interference arriving from adjacent cells.

From my understanding, a similar approach is being proposed for the Mobile Relay Node (MRN)

Anyway, the complete article is as follows:

Improved Interference Rejection and Suppression Technology in LTE Release 11 Specifications from Zahid Ghadialy

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) Updates

Its been a while since I last blogged about WebRTC. Things have been progressing as rather fast pace in this area.



WebRTC capabilities have quietly sneaked in our browsers. There is a debate about who would move to WebRTC before, Apple or Microssoft; Tsahi Levent-Levi makes his predictions here.



As per Light Reading, Japanese operator NTT has opened a WebRTC based chatroom recently.



The Korean operator SK Telecom as been showing off its WebRTC interworking with IMS platform.



The problem with WebRTC can be as seen in the slide above. Classic problem of what was promised and whats the reality.

There are 2 interesting presentations that I am embedding below that I found useful:

Additional Reading:

• Alan Quayle: IMS and WebRTC Workshop
• Disruptive Analysis WebRTC Market Status & Forecast Update - March 2014
• Snapchat made a secret acquisition to power its new video chat - Verge

Further enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (FeICIC)

Recently while delivering a training, I realised that this is a topic that I haven't covered in the blog before, even though I have been talking about it for a while. FeICIC has been introduced in Release-11 and there are a few enhancements as shown above. The main being that instead of an Almost Blank Subframe (ABS) with no other information except for the reference signals, now there is a possibility of reduced power ABS where the data on PDSCH can still be transmitted but on a reduced power level. This would ensure that the capacity of the interferer is not wasted.

Another enhancement on which FeICIC depends on are the advanced receivers (should do a post on it sometime soon). Another feature that allows a better probability of reception is the Transmission Mode 9 (TM9 - see blog post here)

An interesting comment that I received on my Deployments Dilemma Post is also relevant to the discussion here:

The ground reality is generally a lot different than theory. Metrocells often face interference not just from Macrocells but also other Metrocells. The ABS patterns are not just straightforward Macro to pico case but even pico to pico and multiple macros to pico.

Until all the handsets and other dongles could be upgraded with advanced interference cancellation receivers, there would be many scenarios where deployment option 2 may be chaotic. Deployment option 1 can serve the users well in the meantime. 

We can sacrifice efficiency for reliability in the meantime.

I recently posted the Small Cells Research Bible on the Small Cells blog here, the following is the Interference Management part that would help anyone willing to learn more about this feature.

Recent Advances in Wireless Small Cell Networks from Zahid Ghadialy