4G Technology Features and Evolution towards IMT-Advanced

Kiinteiden- ja mobiilipalveluiden kysyntä kasvaa nopeasti ympäri maailmaa. Älykkäiden päätelaitteiden, kuten iPhone:n ja Nokia N900:n markkinoilletulo yhdistettynä näiden korkeaan markkinapenetraatioon ja korkealuokkaiseen käyttäjäkokemukseen lisäävät entisestään palveluiden kysyntää ja luovat tarpeen jatkuvalle innovoinnille langattomien teknologioiden alalla tavoitteena lisäkapasiteetin ja paremman palvelunlaadun tarjoaminen. Termi 4G (4th Generation) viittaa tuleviin neljännen sukupolven mobiileihin langattomiin palveluihin, jotka International Telecommunications Union:in Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) on määritellyt ja nimennyt International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced). Nämä ovat järjestelmiä, jotka pitävät sisällään IMT:n ne uudet ominaisuudet, jotka ylittävät IMT-2000:n vaatimukset. Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) ja IEEE 802.16m ovat IMT-A sertifiointiin lähetetyt kaksi pääasiallista kandidaattiteknologiaa. Tässä diplomityössä esitellään kolmannen sukupolven järjestelmien kehityspolku LTE:hen ja IEEE 802.16e-2005 asti. Lisäksi työssä esitetään LTE-Advanced:n ja IEEE 802.16m:n uudet vaatimukset ja ominaisuudet sekä vertaillaan näiden lähestymistapoja IMT-A vaatimusten täyttämiseksi. Lopuksi työssä luodaan katsaus LTE ja IEEE 802.16e-2005 (markkinointinimeltään Mobile WiMAX) -järjestelmien markkinatilanteeseen.The demand for affordable bandwidth in fixed and mobile services is growing rapidly around the world. The emergence of smart devices like the iPhone and Nokia N900, coupled with their high market penetration and superior user experience is behind this increased demand, inevitably driving the need for continued innovations in the wireless data technologies industry to provide more capacity and higher quality of service. The term "4G" meaning the 4th Generation of wireless technology describes mobile wireless services which have been defined by the ITU's Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) and titled International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced). These are mobile systems that include the new capabilities of IMT that go beyond those of IMT-2000. Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) and IEEE 802.16m are the two main candidate technologies submitted for IMT-Advanced certification. This thesis reviews the technology roadmap up to and including current 3G systems LTE from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and IEEE 802.16e-2005 from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Furthermore, new requirements and features for LTE-Advanced and IEEE 802.16m as well as a comparative approach towards IMT-Advanced certification are presented. Finally, the thesis concludes with a discussion on the market status and deployment strategies of LTE and IEEE 802.16e-2005, or Mobile WiMAX as it is being marketed

Future Trends and Challenges for Mobile and Convergent Networks

Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise, current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites. In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers, network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness, energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and vertical multihoming.Comment: In book 4G & Beyond: The Convergence of Networks, Devices and Services, Nova Science Publishers, 201

Energy Efficient and Cooperative Solutions for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Energy efficiency is increasingly important for next-generation wireless systems due to the limited battery resources of mobile clients. While fourth generation cellular standards emphasize low client battery consumption, existing techniques do not explicitly focus on reducing power that is consumed when a client is actively communicating with the network. Based on high data rate demands of modern multimedia applications, active mode power consumption is expected to become a critical consideration for the development and deployment of future wireless technologies. Another reason for focusing more attention on energy efficient studies is given by the relatively slow progress in battery technology and the growing quality of service requirements of multimedia applications. The disproportion between demanded and available battery capacity is becoming especially significant for small-scale mobile client devices, where wireless power consumption dominates within the total device power budget. To compensate for this growing gap, aggressive improvements in all aspects of wireless system design are necessary. Recent work in this area indicates that joint link adaptation and resource allocation techniques optimizing energy efficient metrics can provide a considerable gain in client power consumption. Consequently, it is crucial to adapt state-of-the-art energy efficient approaches for practical use, as well as to illustrate the pros and cons associated with applying power-bandwidth optimization to improve client energy efficiency and develop insights for future research in this area. This constitutes the first objective of the present research. Together with energy efficiency, next-generation cellular technologies are emphasizing stronger support for heterogeneous multimedia applications. Since the integration of diverse services within a single radio platform is expected to result in higher operator profits and, at the same time, reduce network management expenses, intensive research efforts have been invested into design principles of such networks. However, as wireless resources are limited and shared by clients, service integration may become challenging. A key element in such systems is the packet scheduler, which typically helps ensure that the individual quality of service requirements of wireless clients are satisfied. In contrastingly different distributed wireless environments, random multiple access protocols are beginning to provide mechanisms for statistical quality of service assurance. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive analytical frameworks which allow reliable control of the quality of service parameters for both cellular and local area networks. Providing such frameworks is therefore the second objective of this thesis. Additionally, the study addresses the simultaneous operation of a cellular and a local area network in spectrally intense metropolitan deployments and solves some related problems. Further improving the performance of battery-driven mobile clients, cooperative communications are sought as a promising and practical concept. In particular, they are capable of mitigating the negative effects of fading in a wireless channel and are thus expected to enhance next-generation cellular networks in terms of client spectral and energy efficiencies. At the cell edges or in areas missing any supportive relaying infrastructure, client-based cooperative techniques are becoming even more important. As such, a mobile client with poor channel quality may take advantage of neighboring clients which would relay data on its behalf. The key idea behind the concept of client relay is to provide flexible and distributed control over cooperative communications by the wireless clients themselves. By contrast to fully centralized control, this is expected to minimize overhead protocol signaling and hence ensure simpler implementation. Compared to infrastructure relay, client relay will also be cheaper to deploy. Developing the novel concept of client relay, proposing simple and feasible cooperation protocols, and analyzing the basic trade-offs behind client relay functionality become the third objective of this research. Envisioning the evolution of cellular technologies beyond their fourth generation, it appears important to study a wireless network capable of supporting machine-to-machine applications. Recent standardization documents cover a plethora of machine-to-machine use cases, as they also outline the respective technical requirements and features according to the application or network environment. As follows from this activity, a smart grid is one of the primary machine-to-machine use cases that involves meters autonomously reporting usage and alarm information to the grid infrastructure to help reduce operational cost, as well as regulate a customer's utility usage. The preliminary analysis of the reference smart grid scenario indicates weak system architecture components. For instance, the large population of machine-to-machine devices may connect nearly simultaneously to the wireless infrastructure and, consequently, suffer from excessive network entry delays. Another concern is the performance of cell-edge machine-to-machine devices with weak wireless links. Therefore, mitigating the above architecture vulnerabilities and improving the performance of future smart grid deployments is the fourth objective of this thesis. Summarizing, this thesis is generally aimed at the improvement of energy efficient properties of mobile devices in next-generation wireless networks. The related research also embraces a novel cooperation technique where clients may assist each other to increase per-client and network-wide performance. Applying the proposed solutions, the operation time of mobile clients without recharging may be increased dramatically. Our approach incorporates both analytical and simulation components to evaluate complex interactions between the studied objectives. It brings important conclusions about energy efficient and cooperative client behaviors, which is crucial for further development of wireless communications technologies

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Guiding readers through the basics of these rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations, Mobile Ad hoc Networks: Current Status and Future Trends identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Containing the contributions of leading researchers, industry professionals, and academics, this forward-looking reference provides an authoritative perspective of the state of the art in MANETs. The book includes surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as limited resources and the mobility of mobile nodes. It considers routing, multicast, energy, security, channel assignment, and ensuring quality of service. Also suitable as a text for graduate students, the book is organized into three sections: Fundamentals of MANET Modeling and Simulation—Describes how MANETs operate and perform through simulations and models Communication Protocols of MANETs—Presents cutting-edge research on key issues, including MAC layer issues and routing in high mobility Future Networks Inspired By MANETs—Tackles open research issues and emerging trends Illustrating the role MANETs are likely to play in future networks, this book supplies the foundation and insight you will need to make your own contributions to the field. It includes coverage of routing protocols, modeling and simulations tools, intelligent optimization techniques to multicriteria routing, security issues in FHAMIPv6, connecting moving smart objects to the Internet, underwater sensor networks, wireless mesh network architecture and protocols, adaptive routing provision using Bayesian inference, and adaptive flow control in transport layer using genetic algorithms

Feasibility of wireless mesh for LTE-Advanced small cell access backhaul

Mobiilidatan määrä on muutaman viime vuoden aikana kasvanut voimakkaasti ja nykyiset ennustukset arvioivat eksponentiaalista kasvukäyrää tulevien vuosien aikana. Matkapuhelinjärjestelmät ovat kehittyneet nopeasti tämän trendin ohjaamana. Neljännen sukupolven matkapuhelinverkkostandardien myötä, uudet innovaatiot kuten heterogeeniset verkkoratkaisut tarjoavat ratkaisun nykyisiin skaalautuvuus- ja kapasiteettiongelmiin. Joitain ilmeisiä ongelmakohtiakin kuitenkin esiintyy kuten heterogeenisten verkkojen runkokytkennän toteuttaminen. Yksi lupaavimmista tavoista toteuttaa heterogeenisten verkkojen runkokytkentä on langaton ja itseorganisoituva mesh-verkko. Tämän opinnäytetyön tavoitteena on varmistaa ja testata Nokia Siemens Networksin kehittämän mesh-runkokytkentäverkkokonseptin toteutettavuutta ja toiminnallisuutta soveltuvan validointijärjestelmän avulla. Kaiken kaikkiaan validointijärjestelmä ja sen päälle toteutettu mesh-protokolla toimivat moitteettomasti koko kehitys- ja testausprosessin ajan. Konseptin eri ominaisuudet ja mekanismit todistettiin täysin toteutettaviksi ja toimiviksi. Muutamalla lisäominaisuudella ja konseptiparannuksella mesh-konsepti tarjoaa houkuttelevan ja innovatiivisen ratkaisun heterogeenisten verkkojen runkokytkentään tulevaisuudessa.Mobile traffic demands and volumes are increasing and will dramatically keep increasing in the future. Along with this, mobile networks have evolved to better match this growth. Fourth generation cellular network standard introduced a set of new innovations for mobile communications, including support for heterogeneous network deployments. Heterogeneous networking is the likely answer for future mobile data capacity shortage but also poses some challenges, the most evident being how to implement the backhauling. One of the most promising heterogeneous network backhaul solutions is a meshed radio system with self-organizing features. The main scope of this master's thesis is the verification of functionality and feasibility of a wireless mesh backhaul concept developed by Nokia Siemens Networks through a proof-of-concept system. All in all, the wireless mesh proof-of-concept system performed strongly throughout the development and testing process. The different functionalities were proven to work successfully together. With further development and enhancement, the system concept displays extreme potential for a state-of-the-art heterogeneous network backhaul technology