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.