3.9G (LTE) to 4G

Yesterday I blogged about the LTE-Advanced workshop. There are loads of documents that a lot of you will probably find it useful. You can also check the latest whitepapers and presentations on the 3g4g website here.

Last month Nomor published a whitepaper titled 'The way of LTE towards 4G'. The paper is good summary of the progress in standardisation. The following is summary from that paper with regards to LTE-A standardisation:

3GPP already agreed on the schedule for Release 10 where LTE Advanced will be standardized with:

• functional freeze in December 2010

• ASN.1 freeze in March/June 2011

In practice this means that the Physical Layer specification will have to be completed around September 2010, which leaves just about 9 months time. The protocol, interface and test

specification are to be completed by December 2010.

According to the major LTE-A functional enhancements, the following work items have been approved for Release 10:

• Carrier aggregation for LTE

• Enhanced downlink multiple antenna transmission for LTE

• Uplink multiple antenna transmission for LTE

• Latency reductions for LTE

A presentation introducing LTE-A technologies has been published early this year in [4].

The work on Cooperative Multipoint Transmission (CoMP) is still part of the downlink multiple

antenna work item. It is stated that the standardization impact of downlink CoMP will be assessed and a decision will be done in March 2010 if downlink CoMP will be standardized as part of this work item.

LTE Advanced will be fully built on the existing LTE specification Release 10 and not be defined as a new specification series. Stage 2 (architecture and functional description) will for instance be added to TS 36.300 in Release 10.

Please keep in mind that there are a large number of other work items within Release 10. Remarkably 3GPP also approved a Work Item on LTE Advanced Relays to improve coverage and improve cell edge throughput. The Work Item was supported by key operators.

You can read the complete paper here.

3GPP IMT-Advanced Workshop in Beijing

3GPP technical experts have attended the recent IMT-Advanced workshop, in Beijing, China, hosted by the China MIIT Institute of Communication Standards Research (CATR) and China Mobile.

The workshop was chaired by the 3GPP TSG RAN chairman, Takehiro Nakamura, with the first day given over to 3GPP RAN working group presentations and the second to the twelve IMT-Advanced evaluation groups.

3GPP Presentations:

• LTE technologies (Takehiro Nakamura: TSG-RAN Chair, NTT DOCOMO)
• Physical layer aspects (Matthew Baker: RAN WG1 Chair, Alcatel-Lucent)
• Layer 2 and 3 aspects (Magnus Lindström: RAN WG2, Ericsson)
• RAN architecture aspects (Dino Flore: RAN WG3 Chair, Qualcomm)
• RF aspects (Takaharu Nakamura: RAN WG4 Chair, Fujitsu)
• 3GPP Self evaluation methodology and results (Tetsushi Abe: RAN WG1 Vice-Chair, NTT DOCOMO)

Status reports from the IMT-Advanced Independent Evaluation Groups (IEG):

• ARIB
• ATIS WTSC Evaluation Group
• CEG
• ChEG (Part I) (Part II)
• ETSI
• REG
• TCOE India
• TR 45 (Presentation not available)
• TTA PG707
• WFEG
• WINNER+ (Part I)(Part II

You can view the agenda of the workshop here.

You can also check all the documents directly here.

LOL, Hitler upset for LTE does not have CS domain

LTE Release-8 UE Categories table

I had posted a table earlier about the LTE UE Categories here. Just came across the 3GPP official UE Categories table today as shown in the picture above.

It would be very interesting to see a device supporting 4x4 MIMO later that can be useful in transferring high amounts of data.

Interesting Presentation on Mobile Social Networking in Japan

Japan Mobile SNS Study 2010

View more presentations from yaromir.

If you have any comments or questions, leave it at the authors blog here.

3G4G Stats

I have been asked very often about the stats of 3G4G website and 3G4G blog. So here are some details:

• At the peak (Oct.), the combined page views for both of them reached around 100,000
• In the quietest month (Dec.), the combined page views were around 75,000
• The 3G4G blog has page views from 22,000 (Dec) to 35,000 (Oct).
• The popular pages of the Website are FAQ, LTE and LTE-Advanced.
• The popular pages of the blog are HSPA+ vs LTE, OFDM/OFDMA Difference and F-DPCH.

Glad to see that people are finding both these sources useful. Please feel free to let me know your suggestions and opinions

Picture Source

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year 2010

Time for break and see you next year...

WiMAX gaining foothold in Japan

Photo Source

From Wireless Watch Japan:

The current state of the mobile network environment such as public wireless LAN and the cellular phone lines and those problems were considered last time. This time, the focus is applied to “Mobility WiMAX” of the new service that solves these problems, and it introduces the difference with an existing mobile network. The 2nd explains the point of the IEEE standard by which the specification of mobile WiMAX has been decided.

Mobile WiMAX that the business service started in July, 2009 is a new mobile network that did “Cousin removing” of public wireless LAN and the cellular phone line. It becomes “Communication method of the world standard using the micro wave (frequency band of 3GHz-30GHz)” with WiMAX if it translates literally by the one that “World Interoperability for Microwave Access” was abbreviated.

It is a word “Communication (Access)” the hope of you attention here. “Line from the telephone office to the terminal” is indicated if it is said, “Access line” in the world on the network. In a word, WiMAX is a method to achieve the same role as the accomplishment of “[Furettsu] light” of ADSL and NTT on a wireless network.

Actually, there is details of having started WiMAX as a network for not the mobile network but fixed wireless telecommunications (FWA: Fixed Wireless Access). FWA is a method to send and receive data to the antenna set up in the rooftop in the communication tower and the building between terminals. FWA up to maximum transmission speed 156Mbps is an opening in Japan in December, 1998.

WiMAX is wireless MAN(Metropolitan Area Network) standard to achieve this FWA. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has approved WiMAX as “IEEE 802.16″ in December, 2001.

The bandwidth of 2GHz-11GHz was added back though WiMAX used the bandwidth of improving named 10GHz-66GHz at first. And, the specification named maximum transmission speed 134.4Mbps (occupation bandwidth 28MHz time) or 74.81Mbps (occupation bandwidth 20MHz time) was fixed by the maximum in “IEEE 802.16-2004″ that had been approved in June, 2004 communication distance 48km.

It has corresponded to the handover at 120km per hour.
It reaches up to 4.8km at the speed of 40Mbps or less.

Mobile WiMAX equipped in mobile PC is a wireless network method settled on as derivation standard “IEEE 802.16e” of IEEE 802.16.

Mobility WiMAX is that the maximum difference point of fixation WiMAX of IEEE 802.16 and mobile WiMAX corresponds to the handover (succession) that assumes the movable body of 120km per hour.

In a word, mobile WiMAX is to be able to use it in the train and the car running just like the cellular phone because a surrounding base station communicates one after another in “Hand over” according to the communication situation. There is especially no inconvenience if it thinks the communication distance of the cellular phone is several km though the maximum communication distance of mobile WiMAX is 4.8km and fixation WiMAX 1/10.

It differs according to the occupation bandwidth, and if it is 32Mbps, and it is 20MHz if it is 15Mbps, and 10MHz if the occupation bandwidth is 5MHz, the maximum transmission speed of mobile WiMAX is 75Mbps. In UQ communications that develop mobile WiMAX service domestically, it is sung, “It is 40Mbps or less, and is up-loading, and it is download and 10Mbps or less”. It may be expected that the same degree of the speed as wireless LAN in the office will be obtained as long as the condition is avoided.

Another difference between fixation WiMAX and mobile WiMAX is in the size of the terminal side transmitter-receiver. In fixation WiMAX where long distance/high speed has been achieved by a big transmission output, a considerably big as for terminal side device is needed. On the other hand, the transmitter-receiver of mobile WiMAX is being put in several LSI chips small. An external type is the same degree of the size as USB thumb drive.

Moreover, note PC with built-in controller for mobile WiMAX has been released by each vender since the summer of 2009. The “Let’snote S8/N8″ series of Panasonic especially supports WiMAX by the standard in the consumer model (A corporate model is for subject).

Another strong point is a base station. Wide, mobile WiMAX covers the range where the electric wave reaches and even if the number of base stations is not increased too much, can cover the large range at the cellular phone level. Because it is possible to communicate while it moves by in the train and car, it will be able to be said that it will be a very profitable network for the business user who frequently uses the Web application.

The maintenance of the base station is advanced in domestic various places with steady steps now. I hear that it became possible to use in the government-designated major city and major cities across the country at the end of fiscal year 2009 according to UQ communications.

Note, this is machine translation so ignore the errors.

3G Americas Publishes New Report on LTE SON Self-Optimizing / Self-Organizing Networks

I have blogged about SON networks before. Now has published an educational report titled, The Benefits of SON in LTE, to increase understanding of the improvements in network management that have been developed through 3GPP standards – Release 8, Release 9 and beyond.

Self-Optimizing and Self-Organizing Networks, called SON, can significantly improve network management performance, helping operators and their customers. The 3GPP standards organization is standardizing self-optimizing and self-organizing capabilities for LTE. LTE SON will leverage network intelligence, automation and network management features in order to automate the configuration and optimization of wireless networks, thereby increasing efficiency as well as improving network performance and flexibility.

“The time is right for SON as wireless carriers’ networks have increasing mobile broadband demand and a high level of complexity,” said Chris Pearson, President of 3G Americas. “The good news is that smartphones, netbooks and emerging classes of mobile devices are driving significant growth of wireless data usage. However, operators will need to continue to significantly improve network management capabilities to efficiently meet the demands of this new mobile broadband world.”

The Benefits of SON in LTE describes the motivation behind SON and provides an overview of key SON features contained in Releases 8 and 9 that will serve as a solution for network operators. Motivations for operators to deploy SON include:

• Wireless service providers must now support a growing number of higher-bandwidth data applications and services on their networks
• Operators must drive down the delivery cost per bit
• Radio access network complexity will increase through additions of small cells such as femtocells, picocells as well as WiFi access points to increase and improve coverage and capacity

These and other trends portend ever-increasing demands upon service providers in the areas of network performance and operations.

Initial solutions are offered in the 3GPP Release 8 specifications, which were completed in March 2009, and include SON features such as automatic inventory, software download, neighbor relations and PCI assignment that would be built over 3GPP network management architecture. LTE SON features begin with 3GPP Release 8 and evolve with the expected LTE network evolution stages. In 3GPP Release 9, other SON features are addressed, such as the optimization of coverage and capacity, mobility, RACH, load balancing and support of SON features in multi-vendor network environments.

Other organizations such as the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) have contributed significantly to the development and standardization of SON at 3GPP.

“Self-optimizing networks are a key part in the future-proofing of network reliability and operational efficiency,” said Dr. Peter Meissner, Operating Officer of the NGMN Alliance. “NGMN established a set of initial requirements and since then has worked with its partners to define the remaining requirements and to drive forward the early adoption in the standardization.”

You can find this whitepaper and many other whitepapers on LTE at the 3G4G Library here.

Teliasonera reaches a milestone with first commercial LTE Networks

TeliaSonera has rolled out commercial LTE Networks in Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway. The Swedish network is supplied by Ericsson and the Norway one by Huawei. At the moment only Samsung Dongles are available for browsing the web.

Read the press release here.

By the way, its a bit shameful that the operator wants to market itself and its using the term 4G for LTE as it probably sounds more sexy :) I blogged couple of years back and it still applies that LTE is 3.9G and IMT-Advanced/LTE-Advanced is 4G.