Book Review - Femtocells: Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Technology

Femtocells: Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Technology
by Simon Saunders, Stuart Carlaw, Andrea Giustina, Ravi Rai Bhat, V. Srinivasa Rao

This is not a very thick book with just 252 pages. Someone may say that there is not much to write about Femtocells. I say that you can fill couple of thousand pages not with much difficulty on Femtocells but it is important to seperate the useful things that everyone will be interested in and just keep that in the book. When I told a colleague that a new book on Femtocells is out, the first question he asked me jokingly is does it cover 'Zero Touch'. The answer is, yes it does ;)

It starts with the very basic what Femtocell is and what its not, goes on to talk about the types, the user benefits, Attributes, applications, challenges, etc.

It then goes on to examine the background for small cells, placing femtocells in the context of the history of other solutions for in-building service and explains the market and technological factors which have made femtocells a compelling proposition. It also addresses market issues, covering the benefits and motivations of femtocells for operators, the key market challenges, business case analysis and forecasts for the take-up of femtocells.

Chapter 4 covers radio issues for femtocells, including the requirements and methods for interference management between femtocells, femtocell RF specifications and health issues. There is a very good table that lists out the potential problems of using Femtocells.

The next chapter covers the network architecture of femtocells, particularly the interfaces and protocols for integrating femtocells with the operator network across the Internet and the way in which the various options differ between standards families. This chapter also introduces the 3GPP based Iuh interface for Home NodeB's. There are other interesting Femto architectures like the CDMA based, WiMAX based, GSM based and LTE based covered in this as well.

Then there is a chapter on the Management of Femto's that describes the requirements and approaches for provisioning and managing millions of femtocells in an efficient and scalable fashion. It explains about the TR-069 data structure and management protocol.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to the very important topic of Security. It explains the security aspects of femtocells from a customer and operator perspective, including analysis of the potential threats and solutions.

Chapter 8 covers the standards for femtocells across the main mobile standards families, namely 3GPP, 3GPP2 and WiMAX Forum. It also introduces the industry bodies who are playing important roles in the introduction and proliferation of femtocells. There is a list of all the 3GPP standards for the Home NodeB and Home eNodeB.

Finally there are chapters on Regulation (including lawful interception, etc.), Implementation Considerations (showing refrerence designs, etc.), Business and Service Options (with examples of scenarios and service options) followed by a Summary.

You can learn more about this book from its official website at http://www.femtocellbook.com/

There are lots of things I may not agree on and there are things i would like to argue about but overall It looks like an interesting book especially for people who either work in or follow femtocells area. With the femtocell information scarce at the moment, this book is like information goldmine for readers. I would be interested in hearing from any readers about their opinion of this book.

Vodafone's Lecture series on Mobile Telecom and Networks

This compilation brings together the transcripts of the third of a series of lectures on the subject of Mobile Telecommunications and Networks. The lecture series was established by The Royal Academy of Engineering and Vodafone to celebrate the enormous social and economic benefits that mobile communications have given us – a success story brought about and maintained by excellence in communications engineering. The three lectures in this series were given over the period between March 2008 and February 2009. All three were exceptionally well attended and generated enthusiastic and lively debate and discussions.

The series was opened by Professor P R Kumar, Franklin W Woeltge, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Illinois. His lecture addressed the converging worlds of communications, computation and control – described through infrastructure - free wireless networks, and illustrated with fascinating films of model systems created at the University of Illinois.

The bedrock of all wireless communications systems is radio frequency spectrum, and this was the subject of the second lecture, given by Professor Linda Doyle of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Dublin. She entered into the debate of how one should allocate and manage spectrum, covering approaches from classical ‘command and control’ to dynamic ‘grab what you need when you need it’. Her lecture gave rise to the most lively debate we have had during the Questions and Answers sessions.

Most lectures on mobile communications nowadays are concerned with subjects like broadband access, convergence, mobile widgets or the phone as a computing device, so it was refreshing that in the final lecture of the series Professor Peter Vary of the University of Aachen returned to basics – voice communications. In a fascinating lecture he covered the history of and contemporary research on speech coding for mobile communications, providing great insight into what is the most important function of the phone.

The transcript is available here.

Mobile Marketing - The Most seen screen

Interesting Presentation:

Mobile Marketing 101

View more OpenOffice presentations from Fuor Digital.

New Text Message: "Feed me, I am Thirsty"

Technology that lets plants send text alerts when they're running dry may someday reduce overwatering, says a Discovery Channel report. A chip about the size of a clip-on earring can be attached to a plant leaf and linked to regular cell-phone networks, sending a text message when it's time to irrigate. Watering only when necessary could save water and energy, especially in the arid West. A company called AgriHouse is marketing the chip, which is based on technology developed by NASA for long space trips.

Water in the open spaces of the west is valuable, but it's virtually worth its weight in gold in outer space. The original cell phone for plants was developed years ago by scientists working with NASA on future manned missions to the moon and Mars.

"You need plants on future space missions," said Hans-Dieter Seelig, a scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who worked on the original NASA project.

"They take out waste carbon dioxide, produce breathable oxygen, and the astronauts can use them as food," said Seelig.

During their research, the NASA scientists concluded that astronauts wouldn't be able to take anywhere near enough food and supplies for an estimated two-year mission to Mars. The pilots and Ph.D.'s selected for the trip would have to spend most of their time as celestial subsistence farmers.

To reduce the amount of time and supplies necessary to grow crops, scientists clipped sensors, wired to a central computer, to plants so astronauts would know exactly when and how much water to give them.

During the initial NASA tests the scientists were able to reduce the amount of water necessary to grow plants by 10 percent to 40 percent.

You can see a Video on AgriHouse website here.

A similar approach was also demonstrated earlier this year.

Interactive telecommunications researchers designed a soil-moisture sensor device that can allow a house plant to communicate with its owner. The device can send short messages to a mobile phone or, by using a service called Twitter, it can send short messages to the Internet. The messages can range from reminders to water the plant, a thank you or a warning that you over- or under-watered it. To communicate, probes in the soil emit electric waves. A voltage level based on the moisture content is sent through two wires to a circuit board that compares the optimum moisture level with the current one. A local network receives this data and allows the plant to send a message through the device.

All this is possible through a new system called Botanicalls, which is developed by Interactive Communications researchers. This system allows your plants to send text messages to your cell phone or even on internet. The plants will know when they need water and they will let you know, or, if they have been watered, they will just thank you. More, they will tell you if you put enough water or they need more.

So how Botanicalls works?

Some sensors are placed in the soil with the plant, and they measure the level of moisture. These sensors send a signal to a microcontroller to determine if the moisture is low or high, or if water has been added or not. Based on that, the sensors can send a wireless signal to an internet connected computer than can send a prerecorded message to the plant owner. Messages include “thank you” when the plants are watered, or warnings if the water is too much, or the plants haven’t been watered and they need water.

You can see their video here.

LTE/SAE Trial Updates from LSTI, May 2009

The LTE/SAE Trial Initiative trial results from May 2009 are available here.

More about LSTI Cross-Vendor Interoperability testing for LTE/SAE here.

More information on LTE/SAE is available here.

LTE QCI and End-to-end bearer QoS in EPC

Gary Leonard, Director Mobile Solutions, IP Division, Alcatel-Lucent in a presentation at the LTE World Summit

SMS: Information, MisInformation, Emergency and Spam

The other day someone pointed out that the number of SMS send per day globally is 2 Trillion. I said, surely this cant be true. The population of the world is somewhere around 7 Billion mark. If we assume that everyone uses the phone and sends 1 message per day than that is still 7 Billion messages, 2 Trillion cant possibly be true.

According to a post earlier, 1 Trillion messages were sent in 2008, compared to 363 Billion in 2007. Thats between 3 and 3.5 Billion per day. We may have to wait probably just couple of years before we see 1 Trillion messages per day (assuming the Networks can cope with this amount of SMS's). The reason for sharp rise in the number would be due to various factors.

The first reason being Spam. China is already facing SMS Spam problems. Its becoming such a nuisance that the operators are considering limiting the number of SMS to a max. of 200 messages per hour and 1000 per day. On holidays, 500 and 2000 respectively. I am not sure if Spammers use phones, rather there are many websites allowing bulk messaging facilities. Many companies are also offering power texting facilities that allows big bundles for minimal pricing. The average price being 1 cent per SMS or even cheaper.

Another reason that we should not forget is the introduction of many QWERTY phones that is making life of texters easier. There is some debate as to whether its having good or bad impact on the teens but I think its the health problems we should be worried about more than anything else. Its just matter of time when you get a new phone, there will be a caution note saying: "Caution: Text messaging can seriously harm your health. It can cause sore thumbs, cause sleeping disorders, anxiety and in some cases depression. Please click on I Accept if you would like to use it at your own risk" :)

Deciphering teen text messages is an art in itself. I blogged about it earlier but things change faster than you can anticipate. LG have launched a DTXTR service that can help you decipher your teen text messages. I tried few codes and it failed miserably. I suppose for these kinds of services, one more thing you need is to know the location of the users. Same code word can mean different thing in different countries/states. Webopedia has a very detailed list of these abbreviations.

Finally, I have always wondered why emergency services dont allow SMS. If I am in a bank being robbed, its safer to send a text rather than call and speak to an operator. Good news is that, its already being tested in the US. This should complement the eCall feature in future.

Dictionary of LTE Acronyms

A comprehensive dictionary of LTE acronyms has just been released, providing a useful aid to understanding the LTE specification documents.

A companion to the highly-acclaimed book on LTE, “LTE – The UMTS Long Term Evolution: From Theory to Practice”, the new dictionary provides not just the expansion of each acronym, but significantly also a concise explanation. The dictionary will enable engineers and researchers to find their way through the often bewildering array of acronyms and to understand the LTE specifications with renewed ease.

Written by the editors of the companion book, Stefania Sesia, Issam Toufik and Matthew Baker, from the major telecommunications companies ST-Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, the dictionary is available to download free-of-charge from the website of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons:

Download the dictionary from here.

SMS good or bad for the teens?

When SMS was invented it was though that it’s an ideal way of communicating with somebody in short and that too cheaper than the actual call. What really picked up in the field of SMA was an easy way of communicating with somebody whilst busy doing something else. SMS specially has become a big hit the teens of today and they love every bit of it.

Teenagers worldwide, these days are sending thousands of text messages per month. While one might be tempted to imagine that it is not a problem due to the availability of unlimited text messaging plans, the issue here is hardly a financial one.

Teenagers have taken the texting to a different level where they depict a brilliant example of multitasking. Albeit concerns are growing over issues such as how excessive text messaging threatens proper sleep, as many teenagers text message late into the night. Or as I can imagine, probably even waking up in the middle of the night to check and reply to new text messages.

In the last five years itself text messaging has gained significant momentum with the teenagers worldwide and the pertinent question here is whether such use of mobile devices will create a generation of adults addicted to perpetually buzzing or beeping mobile gadgets. This could produce a generation that has trouble sitting still and focusing on the task at hand.

There is no doubt it’s easy to find a way of getting distracted especially when you are teen. Imagine you are busy doing something important and you phone beeps thus indicating of the arrival of a new message. In this scenario 99% of the teens including some adults as well will definitely be paying attention to the new SMS and mostly replying for it as well.

In my opinion SMS is like any other things to play for the teen which basically keep them interested and involved. Any fun which is easily and readily available to the teens will definitely attract them no matter which generation they belong to. So what can be a boon for some can be bane for others. What is your opinion on text messaging?

Free Sim, Free Calls forever and no Topup needed - Welcome to '3'

Free Skype-to-Skype calls and instant messaging, free Windows Live messenger and free voice mail in the UK. Welcome to a new contract called SIM Zero from '3' UK.

A minimum contract period of 30 days and the ability to make free Skype calls, all for the princely amount of £0 per month is not bad at all. For the occasional one off calls or texts, 3 will charge users 20p per minute regardless of the networks and the time of call while texts will cost users 10p each. Furthermore, each MB of data will be charged at 30p which is fairly reasonable.

If you are likely to make more than 45 minutes worth of calls per month AND you'd like to stick to 3, then they've got a £9 price plan that gives you 100 anytime, any network minutes or texts, or any mix of the two plus free 300 minutes of 3-to-3 calls and a free mobile phone.

Users will not be coerced into topping up their mobile account regularly; 3 recommends using either theh INQ1 or the Skypephone S2 which are both available for £70 for the contract. Nevertheless, you should be able to plug any 3G phone to get the service.

Via: IT Portal