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Friday, May 13, 2016

Issues that must be addressed to realize the 5G architecture vision


Issues to be addressed:

5:39 PM by Alex Wanda · 0

Thursday, May 12, 2016

5G challenges, potential enablers, and design principles.


Based on current trends, it is generally understood that 5G mobile networks must address six challenges that are not adequately addressed by state-of-the-art deployed networks (Long Term Evolution-Advanced, LTE-A): higher capacity, higher data rate, lower E2E latency, massive device connectivity, reduced capital and operations cost, and consistent QoE provisioning. These challenges are shown in the schematic here, together with some potential enablers to address them. The figure provides an overview of the challenges, enablers and corresponding design principles for 5G. It must be noted that the enablers highlighted in the figure also introduce their own set of challenges and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs). 

12:45 PM by Alex Wanda · 0

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Time spent on apps on mobile devices in the United States (A June 2015 Outlook)


Mobile apps began to appear in 2008 and were originally designed for simple information retrieval in the form of calendars, email and weather forecasts. However their popularity quickly encouraged developers to expand into other categories including gaming, banking and shopping apps. Time spent on selected mobile social networks in the U.S. has been measured in billion monthly minutes. These figures reveal that users prefer to spend their time on apps rather than the internet when using their mobile devices.


7:48 PM by Alex Wanda · 0

Battery Life Is A Key Feature For Mobile Devices


Designing a smartphone is ultimately a game of trade-offs: screen size vs. portability; battery life vs. data speeds; appearance vs. sturdiness. Just to name a few. To make these trade-offs, it’s important to know what the consumer wants.

This chart shows which improvements are the most wanted by mobile device users across five countries.



Amazing how battery life is currently big issue in the design of smart phones. 

7:38 PM by Alex Wanda · 0

Sunday, May 8, 2016

FUTURE CHALLENGES IN 5G WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS


The fourth generation wireless communication systems have been deployed or are soon to be deployed in many countries. However, with an explosion of wireless mobile devices and services, there are still some challenges that cannot be accommodated even by 4G, such as the spectrum crisis and high energy consumption. A question to be raised as the pending standardization of 5G wireless communication networks looms is what would be the possible challenges such networks might faces. Here is a list of these;

OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE METRICS

The evaluation of wireless communication networks has been commonly characterized by considering only one or two performance metrics while neglecting other metrics due to high complexity. For a complete and fair assessment of 5G wireless systems, more performance metrics should be considered. These include spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, delay, reliability, fairness of users, QoS, implementation complexity, and so on. Thus, a general framework should be developed to evaluate the performance of 5G wireless systems, taking into account as many performance metrics as possible from different perspectives. There should be a trade-off among all performance metrics. This requires high-complexity joint optimization algorithms and long simulation times. 

1:32 AM by Alex Wanda · 0

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Big Data for Communication Service Providers (CSPs)


People, devices and networks are constantly generating data. When users stream videos, play the latest game with friends, or make in-app purchases, their activity generates data about their needs and preferences, as well as their QoE. Even when users put their devices in their pockets, the network is generating location and other data that keeps services running and ready to use. As a result, the rate of mobile network data traffic growth is increasing rapidly. It is estimated that by 2020, the number of smartphone subscriptions will have increased from today’s 2.7 billion to 6.1 billion, and the total amount of mobile traffic generated by smartphones will be five times that of today. The big-data-driven telecom analytics market alone is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent – with annual revenues expected to reach USD 5.4 billion at the end of 2019. Communication service providers (CSPs) can make use of this big data to drive a wide range of important decisions and activities. These include: designing more competitive offers and packages; recommending the most attractive offers to subscribers during the shopping and ordering process; communicating with subscribers about their usage, spending and purchase options; configuring the network to deliver more reliable services; and monitoring QoE to proactively correct any potential problems. All these activities enable improved user experience, increased customer satisfaction, smarter networks and extended network functionality to facilitate progress into the Networked Society. The profound impact that increased broadband networking will have on society will also create business opportunities in new areas for CSPs. Improved real-time connectivity and data management enables the creation of tailored data sets, readily available for analysis and machine learning. This enables data-driven efficiency improvements in several business areas – for example, transport, logistics, energy, agriculture and environmental protection. Furthermore, decision making in business and society will be facilitated by access to insights based on more accurate and up-to-date data. In the past, CSPs were prevented from benefiting from the value of big data on account of its sheer weight. The volume, velocity and variety – or the three Vs – of big data were simply overwhelming.

These data-handling challenges have now largely been met by a variety of easily obtained tools. Distributed databases, complex event-processing frameworks, analytics libraries and so on have been developed in the open-source community and are readily available to CSPs. But like a blank spreadsheet, these tools are simply a platform for data handling. The real value comes from knowing which combination of the vast array of data elements reveals the desired insights. That is where deep network and operational expertise are of paramount value. Only when these key relationships are understood can the necessary insights – such as user behavior, network performance and causes of experience issues – be gained.

1:40 PM by Alex Wanda · 0

Monday, November 2, 2015

High Speed Broadband Mobile Services: What The Customers Are Waiting For


Demands for wireless data services are showing rapid growth due to evolved networks for high-speed connectivity, wide-scale deployment, flat-rate pricing plans and Internet-friendly devices (smartphones). Consumers rely heavily, and often exclusively, on mobile devices for their communications needs. Therefore, the normal trend is to require, from the mobile system, the same performances as the one offered by fixed networks with ADSL.


Very high bit-rate DSL (VDSL), fiber optics or coaxial cable. This comparison raises the level of the bitrate upto 10 Mbps in the first step, and increases upto 30 Mbps. Officially, the target stands at 100 Mbps, the requirement assigned by ITU-T IMT Advanced, but as observed on the fixed networks, very few customers can make a proper use of such a bitrate.

Applications are developed to follow the technical improvement of the systems. They offer a whole range of services, which subsequently increases the request for more bandwidth and more capacity. Basically, they are composed of:

12:20 AM by Alex Wanda · 0

Monday, August 31, 2015

5G: Emergence of Business Models driven by Cooperation of Nodes


Identifying attractive business models for the network/service provider and users based on cooperation is essential in order to secure the adoption of 5G technology. This article identifies the Cooperation of Nodes as a driver of new business models showing how we can exploit cooperation between user terminals and heterogeneous networks and operators.

The ability to use mobile terminals at any time and any place without being weary of battery supply seems to be a futuristic approach. However by exploiting smart cooperative networking concepts, this vision can take a step closer to reality.

Exploiting these technology paradigm in tandem, can lead to new radio topologies that are able to provide energy efficient connectivity and thus battery lifetime in mobile phones enabling the use of services that require greater bandwidth than legacy services currently provided by UMTS technology. Most of the research in cooperative networking technology has addressed the technical and engineering ways to save energy.

In present days, to support cooperative networking in the cellular network market, it is absolutely necessary to have good business models that show the main benefits of this new architecture and the revenues associated.

Cooperation is a strategy of a group of entities working or acting together towards a common or individual goal. Correspondingly, the connotation of cooperative networking is described as devices working together to achieve a goal, within a network. Wireless devices, controlled ultimately by human, can be considered as selfish, without any incentive to cooperate by nature.

The reason, that this phenomenon occurs, is that a wireless device is always interested in maximizing its own benefits. So cooperation adds costs to mobile devices, but bringing new services that can increase the performance of a mobile device. However, in any cooperation network, the communication ultimately depends on the willingness of the nodes to cooperate. Such cooperation can only be established and maintained if fairness and profitability are guaranteed among cooperating nodes. Therefore, to avoid the collapse of cooperation, robust cooperation rules and good incentives are required.


To understand the incentives and basic rules for cooperation, an observation from cooperation used in nature is needed. The cooperative network is often realized in the form of a composite access network, which is composed of heterogeneous networks. With the rapid development of technologies and mobile networks, especially with the arrival of LTE, certain characteristics have not been able to compete or keep up with the technology growth, mainly the battery autonomy of mobile devices and other features such as quality of service, higher throughput or spectral efficiency. Dealing with this paradigm provided the impetus for new ideas and possible innovations in the area of cooperation, aimed at combating the negative features resulting from the progress in mobile networks. This cooperation could create, through network operators, mechanisms to encourage customers to cooperate using their mobile devices.


As shown in the illustration besides, one of the main methods of cooperation is the cooperation among mobile devices that can be done through short-range communication technologies such as Bluetooth, UWB or WLAN. These technologies promote low energy consumption, while providing high quality of service. The main avantages of cooperative communications are ;


§  Reducing the power consumption of mobile devices and decreasing the transmission power of base stations;

§  Increasing the quality of service, since with strong signal, customers can achieve better services without failure, e.g. higher data rates;

§  Lower delay between cooperative users;

§  Possibility to create more services like context exchanges between nodes or parallel processing;

§  Decreasing the carbon footprint. Base stations and mobile devices consume much electricity in their use phase, which makes energy saving a valuable contribution for these facilities;

§  Better use of wireless spectrum;

§  Overcoming the limited cellular capacity. For multicast services such as video streaming or file downloading the benefit is obvious. In this case the cooperative devices receive partially the original stream and collaboratively merge it over the short-range communication links.

Nowadays, infrastructure networks (i.e. cellular networks) do not expect or anyhow permit cooperation among connected mobile devices. However, as some wireless environments enable the realization of ad hoc cooperative behaviors, it seems natural that infrastructure networks could also benefit from such cooperation.

From a general perspective, the most interesting business cases are related to battery power savings at mobile devices. Due to its locality and gain from statistical multiplexing (traffic aggregation), such energy saving gain can be observed with ad hoc cooperative networks. Still, wireless ad hoc cooperative networks are to be successful only if they are able to align the current individual and selfish assumptions of the mobile devices into a cooperative paradigm that succeeds to benefit all the entities involved in the cooperation. Current assumptions for wireless ad hoc networking are:

§  Mobile devices are expected to achieve selfish goals, enforced by users or running services;
§  Mobile devices belong to different users;
§  Mobile devices are served by different PLMNs (different network operators).

The enlisted assumptions, which are obstacles to cooperation, can be overcome with the introduction of motivational and incentives systems, which encourage various forms of cooperative behavior. Examples of such cooperative behavior are altruistic cooperation, non-altruistic cooperation or reciprocal cooperation. Each of these forms of behavior has its stability and thus, it has to be resilient to the number of challenges derived from the transient nature of the wireless communication system.


A number of cooperation challenges that need to be addressed to encourage cooperation in ad hoc networks and include;

Motivation and fairnessthe two concepts need to be addressed by the cooperative network to encourage cooperation among users, to provide fair access to the resources and to punish the adversaries (to discourage malicious and greedy behaviors). Fairness problems affect also the design of the motivational mechanisms. Furthermore, another known fairness problem is related to location, as mobile devices with more favorable location receive more incentives, leading to even higher income.

Malicious behaviorsalthough authentication and access control can reinforce cooperation through prevention against external attacker, there are still possibilities for users to exploit the cooperation even in the presence of effective authentication and access control mechanisms.

Privacy protection: the key to the success of any reciprocity based cooperation strategy is the ability to identify (and possibly also punish) the defective nodes, and thus, mobile devices cannot stay anonymous. Furthermore, the reputation ratings have to be assigned to correct mobile device and payments or reciprocal behavior returned to correct initiator.

Cooperation maintenance: as a consequence of mobility or in general, transient changes in channel quality, the node which realizes a cooperative scenario may experience reduction of the quality in provided relaying service or decrease in the reliability of provided information. This may lead to a situation where users are unfairly treated due to decrease in incentives or reputation. Thus, reputation system has to recognize faulty behavior and distinguish it from malicious behavior.

Observabilitythe results of the cooperation are highly dependent also on the ability to identify and distinguish cooperative behavior from selfish. In wireless networks, a typical situation is that nodes have non-equal information, leading to information asymmetry.



6:33 PM by Alex Wanda · 0

Friday, June 5, 2015

5 Pillars of 5G


5 key building blocks for 5G, as illustrated besides are elaborated herein.  Each of these blocks is discussed with highlights their role and importance for achieving 5G








8:33 PM by Alex Wanda · 1