MWC: vendors compete for clearest 5G crystal ball March 03 2015

by Caroline Gabriel, Research Director Maravedis-Rethink

Big wireless suppliers try to influence operators' and regulators' agendas as they dream up visions of the next generation.

While the big network vendors have mainly confined their MWC announcements and previews to relatively short term developments, none of them could resist breathing the '5G' word, seeking to convince their audiences that they had somehow stumbled on the secret ingredients for the next generation of wireless, well ahead of the actual standards bodies.

Ericsson promised to demonstrate "fundamental 5G functionality" in Barcelona, to support both human and machine applications. The Swedish vendor even unveiled results from its 5G testbed, which it says has performed the remarkable feat of already achieving two 5G milestones (even before anyone knows what 5G will be). The testbed includes base stations and concept devices operating in the 15GHz band, indicating the importance most vendors are placing on high frequency spectrum for next generation standards.

Of course, like all the vendors, Ericsson hopes that by calling its R&D efforts '5G' it will improve their chances of being included in the standards, or at least the basic concepts, which do go on to underpin the next generation.

Its two supposed milestones are 5G/LTE dual connectivity and 5G multipoint connectivity, the company said. The first supports a 5G device moving between LTE and the new network, establishing simultaneous connections with both before seamlessly handing over, in order to smooth the user experience. The second allows the 5G device to connect to two 5G base stations simultaneously, improving bit rate performance with multiple downlink streams, as well as signal strength and resilience.

Both of these are 4G concepts, adapted for the supposed characteristics of the new generation network (ultra-small cells, ultra-low power, support for millions of sensors, and so on). As in 4G, multipoint connectivity will be particularly important to enable multilayer HetNets with macrocells, small cells and WiFi interworking seamlessly.

Nokia, too, has been giving a glimpse of what 'future 5G' demonstrations it will make in Barcelona. It will show off radios running in high frequency millimeter and centimeter wave bands (3.5GHz to 70GHz), which will boost capacity, and will be combined with new frame structures to support latency down to single-digit milliseconds. These will be particularly focused on the IoT.

Its good customer Korea Telecom will be partnering with Nokia in the MWC 5G and IoT demonstrations and the operator's head of networks, Seong-Mok Oh, said: "I hope that the strategic partnership with Nokia, including the joint demonstration at MWC 2015, will lay a foundation for the two companies' leadership position along the journey towards an IoT world."

Nokia has also been working on massive MIMO trials with KT's rival, SK Telecom, though these are looking to a shorter timeframe than 5G, initially at least. The two companies said this week they had achieved peak downlink speeds of 600Mbps using 4x4 MIMO. They first got to 300Mbps by implementing the MIMO array in a 20MHz block of spectrum, and then doubled that speed by doing the same in a second 20MHz chunk and aggregating the two. Devices with four antennas and carrier aggregation support have not been developed, so Nokia used a simulated device supplied by test and measurement specialist Aeroflex.

And 4×4 MIMO will be challenging to deploy in a commercial network, because of the need to squeeze four antennas into a small device, and also because it is difficult to maintain the right RF conditions for the 4x4 airlink, so real world user experience may be patchy.

Japan's NEC promises to outline its 5G vision with demonstrations and three white papers outlining what it believes will be the key enabling technologies in 2020 and beyond. These focus on the access network, the backhaul, and massive MIMO, particularly its development of a 'massive-element antenna' for future small cells.

Like Huawei, its post-2020 vision is heavily geared to machine services, from intelligent transport to the use of big data to save energy consumption, as well as next generation consumer multimedia offerings and ultra-accurate logistics systems. The heart of this platform will be SDN, virtualization and Cloud-RAN, all areas where NEC has engaged in advanced R&D and trials.

And Samsung says it will show off three 5G "technology candidates" at MWC. Chang Yeong Kim, head of the DMC R&D Center at the Korean firm, said in a statement: "We consider 5G to be a transformation of how networks are constructed and how radio resources are used. To support 100 times greater throughputs at a fraction of the latency, we need to consider more than just a single network component; we need to look at how everything works together."

The three candidates highlighted by Samsung are a nearly-commercial implementation of wireless backhaul in 60GHz spectrum, combining active and passive radio steering techniques to increase the range of the radio without exceeding unlicensed-band power output limits. An active antenna array enables a beamformed radio signal to be directed at a passive lens antenna, which further concentrates the radio signal toward a fixed point with high precision and multi-gigabit data rates.

The second technology is 'full dimension MIMO' (FD-MIMO). Current MIMO solutions have antennas configured to form beams only horizontally. Users who are at the same horizontal angle from the antenna (even at different vertical angles) still receive the same signal and continue to share radio resources. With the introduction of FD-MIMO and 2D-array antenna technology, wireless signals can be adaptively beamformed to specific users in both horizontal and vertical domains. That delivers a more targeted signal to more than eight users per cell at a time and is good for high rise buildings, stadiums and other crowded locations.

Samsung said it is leading the standardization of FD-MIMO in the upcoming 3GPP Release 13.

It also says it will demonstrate peak stationary data rates of 7.5Gbps - or 1.2Gbps when moving at 100 kilometers per hour - using 28GHz millimeter wave spectrum and Samsung's Hybrid Adaptive Array antenna technology.

However, amid all this cleverness, Peter Merz, head of radio systems technology and innovation at Nokia Networks, injected a note of realism in a recent interview with Telecom.com. He said: "I want to stress that 5G is not around the corner. We're expecting the first commercial roll-outs and deployments starting in 2020. We still have five years to go in order to research technologies, go through standardization, free up spectrum, verify the technologies and then iron out specifications in order to have a ready-made, lean-cut, efficient technology that can be deployed by operators starting in 2020. 5G is like a marathon, it's not a race."

We can only hope that vendors are bearing such words in mind in Barcelona and focusing most of their efforts on real world requirements for 2016 to 2018, even while they seek to influence operators, standards bodies and regulators building their long term plans.

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WiFi hits new speeds, but can Ethernet cope? October 21 2014

By Caroline Gabriel, Research Director, Maravedis-Rethink

The latest R&D project in 60GHz spectrum comes from Samsung, which can transfer a 1Gbyte movie in three seconds. However, as the speed wars heat up in WiFi, all these data rates are going to need backhaul support, an issue Broadcom and others are seeking to address through new Ethernet standards.

The race to break speed records in WiFi is almost as intense as it is in cellular, and Samsung is a prominent name in both. The Korean firm has been demonstrating ‘5G’ prototypes hitting gigabit speeds, but WiFi can support even higher data rates, and the company says it has achieved up to tenfold increase on current speeds.

In both WiFi and cellular R&D, the key to blistering speeds is usually the combination of techniques such as advanced MIMO, with high frequency spectrum. Samsung says it has developed a version of WiGig (the WiFi-like standard for the 60GHz band) which boosts the current maximum theoretical data rate for a consumer device fivefold – and in terms of real world average speeds, the gap is 10 times.

The prototype system enables a 1Gbyte movie to be transferred in under three seconds and uncompressed high definition video to be streamed in real time. Like other next generation WiFi efforts, Samsung says its technology removes the gap between theoretical and actual speeds, and of course it will hope that its breakthrough will give it an influential position in emerging standards, as well as differentiation for its own future products.

“Samsung has successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialization” of the 60GHz WiFi technology, claimed Kim Chang Yong, head of a Samsung R&D center, in a statement. “New and innovative changes await Samsung’s next generation devices, while new possibilities have been opened up for the future development of WiFi technology.”

Amid rising competition in its heartland smartphone business, Samsung is investing in R&D in many areas which could extend its business model, including software and media platforms, enterprise platforms and cutting edge infrastructure for ‘5G’, which is expected to include technologies derived both from LTE and WiFi. The first products to be targeted with 60GHz WiFi are likely to be audiovisual home and mobile media devices, telecoms infrastructure and medical systems, said Samsung.

Samsung’s rivals are all working on enhancing WiFi for higher speed and better quality of experience in future. For instance, Huawei recently demonstrated 10Gbps connections in conventional 5GHz spectrum.

However, the faster WiFi gets, the more challenging its backhaul issues will be. With that in mind, Broadcom, HP and Cisco are drumming up interest in dramatically speeding up gigabit Ethernet, to keep up with the pace of change in WiFi.

The two giants claim there is a growing need for standard physical layers running at 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps, to fit between the current Gigabit Ethernet standard and the high end 10Gbps platform. The standard would cover ranges of 100 meters over Cat E twisted pair cabling, so that changes to cable infrastructure would not be required as they would for 10Gbps and above.

The main reason is the rapid increase in the speed of WiFi. Enterprise and hotspot WLANs are adopting the latest 802.11ac iteration, and its gigabit speeds are threatening to drown the access points’ wired Ethernet backhaul links.

The two companies are proposing the formation of a study group within the IEEE 802 effort, focused on a Next Generation Enterprise Access Base-T PHY. This will get its first hearing at the IEEE 802 plenary in San Antonio, Texas on November 3-6. The initiators of the would-be study group are Yong Kim, senior technical director at Broadcom, and David Law of Hewlett-Packard, chair of the 802.3 working group, and Cisco has also lent its support.

They say in their invitation: “This is a call for interest to initiate a Study Group to explore the need for one or more new Ethernet speed(s) between 1Gbps and 10Gbps over balanced twisted pair cabling. We believe there is a market need, driven by IEEE 802.11ac wireless access points, to support higher than 1Gbps Ethernet rates at a 100m reach. Higher performance end devices like desktop and laptop PCs, as well as other enterprise applications for Ethernet, will also benefit from the new data rates provided by this work.”

John D'Ambrosia, a Dell fellow and veteran of Ethernet standards efforts, told EETimes there was significant interest and the study group was likely to be approved. "I wouldn't be surprised to see a dual-rate effort come out of this," he commented.

There is also work going on far higher up the Ethernet performance scale, in the area which feeds into Carrier Ethernet and mobile backhaul platforms. A de facto standards alliance was formed in July to look at 25G and 50G Ethernet, but the IEEE quickly responded with its own study group, focused on the same data rates, a few days later. These different efforts highlight the diversity of applications for Ethernet these days, requiring a faster development cycle and a wider variety of speeds. "People have removed the barriers of traditional 10x Ethernet upgrades,” said d’Ambrosia.

Meanwhile, Ethernet PHY specialist Aquantia is getting in early, and in time-honoured fashion seeking to create a technology in advance of an IEEE standards effort, which could then form the basis for that standard. Its new AQrate range supports 2.5G and 5G rates over 100m of Cat E twisted pair cable. The 28nm parts are based on Aquantia's existing 10G Ethernet PHY, which is in production and work in conjunction with FPGAs and IP from Xilinx.