GigaOM » Het Net

EU investigates super-dense networking and other “5G” technologies

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:01:36 +0000

Carriers worldwide will begin their first small cell deployments next year with the aim of creating dense layers of 3G and 4G capacity. The end goal of these shrunken cells is to put massive amounts of bandwidth precisely where people are using it: malls, arenas, public plazas, urban parks and busy business districts.

But the first wave of small cells mounted on outdoor street poles and ceilings could just be the beginning. A consortium of technology companies and universities brought together by the European Commission is investigating a concept called the super-dense network, which could put multiple tiny cells in every room. We’re not just talking networks on the small scale, but on the human scale.

The consortium has the rather ungainly name of Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for the Twenty-twenty Information Society, but thankfully it’s using the moniker METIS for short. With the help of a €16 million (U.S. $21.2 million) grant for the European Union, METIS is tasked with identifying the network technologies beyond the LTE-Advanced standards being developed today.

These so-called 5G technologies could take the form of new radio air interfaces, new cellular architectures like heterogeneous networks and wide-area mobile mesh, and even the virtualization of the network itself, said Jan Färjh, Head of Standardization and Industry for Ericsson, the network vendor spearheading METIS. Färjh uses the word “could” because no one in consortium knows what form the network of 2020 and beyond will take. These new technologies are on the bleeding edge and it is METIS’ goal to determine which are technically and commercially feasible.

“We have to be prepared for the world 10 years after LTE and LTE-Advanced,” Färjh said. While vendors and the standards bodies have some good ideas about what the capabilities of our networks should be in 2020, Färjh said, it’s not obvious what those networks should look like.

Jan Färjh

To that end METIS is opening up multiple fields of investigation, digging into research projects in the labs of academic institutions like Aalborg University in Denmark and Poznan University of Technology in Poland. Though the big vendors and carriers like Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia and Telefónica are all there, Metis is also reaching beyond the traditional wireless industry to include companies like BMW. One of the big areas METIS will explore, Färjh said, is vehicle-to-vehicle networking; one day, cars won’t just be end-points in the network, they’ll be nodes within it.

Another field Färjh said METIS will delve into is the possibility of moving baseband processing to the cloud. Today’s radio access network (RAN) is all designed so that every base station processor can handle its cell’s peak load, but most cells are only at peak capacity for a small portion of the day. That’s a lot of processing power that’s just sitting idle throughout the network. Vendors like Intel have proposed moving those base stations into the cloud, creating a set of shared processing resources.

“What if we had a flexible architecture in which you can move around processing power to wherever its needed in the network,” Färjh said. “We could take the virtualization model and apply it to the mobile network.”

In addition to car-to-car connectivity, METIS will also look into making devices nodes in ad hoc networks, Färjh said. Instead of communicating directly with a tower, our phones and gadgets could relay their data between one another in a giant mesh, eventually offloading their data into the mobile network proper through the most efficient connection or combination of connections. These are concepts being explored by startup Open Garden and the open-source mesh-networking initiative Commotion.

Whether all or any of these technologies make it into METIS’s final set of recommendations 30 months from now is hard to predict, Färjh said. The technologies themselves might be viable on their own, but their practical implementation is another story. For instance, backhaul is very real obstacle to super-dense networking and Cloud-RAN, both of which would need to be plugged into huge transport pipes. We can’t just plan future networks. We have to plan the networks that will support those networks.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user higyou

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Soon cell towers will start following you

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:17:08 +0000

Intucell is working with an unnamed North American operator to build a new kind of self-aware cellular network. The Israeli-startup’s self optimizing network (SON) technology will turn what has hitherto been a static cellular grid into a dynamic system of constantly expanding and shrinking cells that can follow customers as they move throughout the network. In the near term, that means more customers getting faster speeds more often and dropping fewer calls. But in the long term, SON techniques like Intucell’s will become foundational technology for the future heterogeneous network.

First, some background about how wireless networks behave: A cellular network is a shared resource, meaning a cell’s capacity is divided among all of the customers currently within it, but the overall capacity of that cell is determined by where all those customers happen to be within the cell. If customers are all at the cell’s perimeter where the air link is most fragile, then the overall capacity is small. If those customers are clustered in the center, then the overall capacity available increases.

Furthermore, a cell’s capacity is always a weakest link type of situation. An outlying device at the edge of the cell will degrade the capacity available to customers at its center. Intucell’s technology is designed to solve that problem by identifying those situations in which a cell’s capacity isn’t being utilized to its fullest. The SON intelligence forces towers to talk to one another and recognize when outliers at the cell’s fringes are spoiling the party for rest. Intucell then tells neighboring cells to expand to grab those edge customers, while the original cell shrinks, boosting the capacity available to remaining customers within it.

“Until now optimizing a radio access network has been sort of a type of witchcraft,” Intucell CEO Rani Wellingstein in a recent interview. “Engineers would typically retune networks on a weekly or a monthly basis. That kind of model was good for when traffic was not so dynamic, but today congestion is moving dynamically through the network.”

But wait, SON can do more

Last month, Israel’s Pelephone became the first operator to commercially deploy Intucell’s technology network-wide, though Wellingstein said other Tier I operators globally are now using the SON system. In North America, a major carrier is using the technology in a commercial trial in two cities, Wellingstein said, though he wouldn’t reveal which one.

Operators are using the technology to retune the network every few minutes, which allows them to jigger the network for the changing traffic patterns throughout the day. But Wellingstein said the SON platform can retune in real time, which would allow the network to account not just for where its customers are but where they will be.

Take the example of city bus with a 4G connection distributed to all of its passengers through Wi-Fi. Normally passengers would experience huge fluctuations in bandwidth as they moved from a cell’s center to its edge and crossed over into neighboring cell’s edge and so forth. But by anticipating where that hotspot-on-wheels is going, the network could grow the cell it’s driving through, keeping its edge well ahead of the bus and thus maintaining its high-bandwidth connection. Meanwhile, SON intelligence would also tell a neighboring cell running on a different frequency to expand, so that both cells overlap. When it’s finally time for the first cell to relinquish its connection to the second, the bus would already be well within that second cell’s perimeter and instantly have access to a much higher-bandwidth connection.

Intucell estimates these techniques can reduce dropped call rates by 10 percent and even more significantly, boost overall data capacity throughout the network anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent. That will have a huge impact on how carriers plan for future growth. Not only will they be able to offer faster and more consistent speeds, it would allow them to slow down the endless cycle of capacity upgrades as more customers sign up for 3G and 4G services.

Enter het net

Ultimately, SON will have its biggest impact as the industry moves to the next phase of cellular design: the heterogeneous network, or het net for short. Rather than build networks merely as a bunch of macro cells in a grid, operators will throw a myriad of small cells into the mix, all of which live inside of their macro brethren. The big network will be used to provide an umbrella layer of coverage, while the ‘small’ network of millions of metro-, pico-, and femtocells will supply enormous quantities of capacity.

We’re already starting to see the beginnings of het net with public Wi-Fi networks. Either at the behest of their carriers or on their own recognizance, customers are offloading enormous amounts of data onto free or cheap Wi-Fi access points. But operators like Verizon Wireless hope to recreate such topologies using their own spectrum. The complexities of such a network are enormous. Not only would they involve individual carriers managing networks of hundreds of thousands – if not millions — of nodes rather than thousands, but those small cells would need to utilize the same spectrum as the over-arching macrocells above them. That means highly dynamic network organization technologies like SON will be necessary to wrap those cells around one another. Otherwise, het net would just be another word for noise.

Tower Image courtesy of Flickr user Nikhil Verma

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With Picochip, Mindspeed buys big into a small market

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:24:02 +0000

Networking silicon vendor Mindspeed Technologies aims to become a big player in wireless infrastructure in a very small way. It is purchasing femtocell system-on-a-chip (SoC) maker Picochip for $51.8 million, creating what Mindspeed hopes will be a powerhouse in the so-far disappointing but still potentially lucrative miniature base station market.

Femtocells are essentially private cellular nodes that carriers give or sell to their customers to improve their coverage and provide additional 3G and 4G capacity. They use the same frequencies as the overall macro network, but they link back to the carrier’s network through the customer’s home or office broadband connection. Mindspeed estimates that its Trancede and Picochip’s PicoXcell SoC lines command a combined 70 percent of the HSPA femtocell semiconductor market and has the biggest exposure to femtocell manufacturers developing the next generation of LTE femtocells. Those would be some impressive stats if there were more of a femtocell market to speak of. The demand among operators for home and business base stations didn’t exactly go gangbusters.

In June, Informa Telecoms and Media reported that 2.3 million femtos had been installed in homes and businesses around the world. That may seem like a large number, but not when you compare it to the 1.6 million macrocells deployed at towers and on rooftops globally. Femtocells were supposed to webscale the cellular network, turning a network of a few big public nodes into a network with millions upon millions of small private nodes. The carriers’ lackluster enthusiasm for femtos, however, soon became apparent due to the interference problems. And as the smartphone gained popularity, Wi-Fi became a much cheaper and easier way to offload mobile data and voice traffic.

The femto vendors haven’t given up. They’ve changed tack, positioning their formerly private femtos as public “small cells,” which can be used to used to offload data capacity in congested outdoor and indoor networks. They may be on to something here as small cells fit nicely with the emerging wireless design concept of the heterogeneous network (or het net). The basic idea of het net is that the single monolithic wireless network will devolve into multiple networks, some providing an umbrella of persistent coverage while others focus solely on packing tremendous amounts of capacity into small areas.

Even if Het Net takes off, femto makers won’t necessarily be the benefactors. As you move into the public wide area network, you venture into the domain of the big telecom vendors, who tend to be very tight with their carrier customers. Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei are all developing small cell solutions of their own and they’re bringing established telecom silicon vendors such as Texas Instruments and Freescale along for the ride. Here Mindspeed may have an advantage. It isn’t a small specialist company like Picochip and has a established portfolio of ARM-based processors used throughout the telecom infrastructure market, counting Cisco Systems, NSN, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung among its customers.

Mindspeed is paying $27.5 million in cash and issuing 5.19 million new shares to Picochip’s investors. Mindspeed will also pay up to $25 million in cash by 2013 if Picochip meets certain unnamed financial performance objectives. Mindspeed expects to close the acquisition this quarter.

Picochip isn’t the femto vendor that’s attracting attention. Femto maker and software developer ip.access in December raised an additional $15 million in venture capital. Last year, Radisys bought femto software developer and designer Continuous Computing. The femto market seems to be heating up, but let’s hope it doesn’t flame out.

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