Nokia Siemens Networks Beyond 4g White Paper Online 20082011
Nokia Siemens Networks Beyond 4g White Paper Online 20082011
Nokia Siemens Networks Beyond 4g White Paper Online 20082011
Executive summary
Contents 3 4 5 6 9 13 14 14 15 Mobile networks face a decade of change Continued global effort will be vital State of the art LTE-Advanced Significant potential for further Radio Evolution Beyond 4G: The technical cornerstones Techno-Economical aspects Worldwide collaboration on standardization Nokia Siemens Networks research leads the way Conclusion: Delivering the gigabit experience Maintaining the pace of radio access evolution This White Paper describes how the underlying radio access technologies will develop further by another factor of 100 over the next 10 years, ensuring that there is no slowdown in the evolution of radio capabilities. Nokia Siemens Networks is actively engaged in collecting requirements and viewpoints as well as shaping this development. We are researching advanced radio network solutions to support up to 1000 times higher traffic volumes compared to 2010 traffic levels. Welcome to the next evolutionary stage of the mobile experience Beyond 4G.
Beyond 4G
Machine-to-machine
Smartphones Super-phones
Laptops
2 Energy 0 Latency
Scalability Cost per Bit Figure 2. Design criteria for Beyond 4G systems
Consistency
Beyond 4G
The wireless networks environmental impact is becoming an increasingly important consideration. Improving the energy efficiency of network components, such as base stations and access points, not only cuts CO2 emissions but, also reduces operational expenses, lowering the cost per bit. This is important, considering the expected traffic and throughput growth up to 2020. A decade from now, mobile broadband systems must meet these requirements. Fulfilling these will strongly influence the economic success of the wireless sector, from device and component manufacturers, to network and service providers. Todays wireless systems fall short of 2020 demands and significant research and development effort will be needed over the next decade. Figure 3 shows the key enablers to be investigated, as well as the different Key Performance Indicators that will be used to verify system performance.
KPIs
Beyond 4G
Heterogeneous networks
Carrier Aggregation
+
Carrier 1 Carrier 2
Up to 100 MHz
Beyond 4G
2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 MHz 1000 800 600 400 200 0
Unlic 5 GHz Unlic 2.4 GHz 3700 3400 2600 2300 2100 TDD 2100 1800 900 800 700 450 2010 2012 2015 2020
Beyond 4G
The link level capacity is bound by the Shannon limit, but that does not apply at the system level where several cells interact with each other. System efficiency can be enhanced by clever designs in which inter-cell interference can be optimized. Todays spectral efficiency is typically between 0.5 and 1.0 bps/Hz/cell (for example HSPA), taking into account legacy terminal and backhaul limitations. Efficiency could be pushed to 5 - 10 bps/Hz/cell by using multi-antenna and multi-cell transmission and cooperation as shown in Figure 6. Meanwhile, radio latency has no fundamental limits, except those imposed by the speed of light, and could be pushed into the millisecond range or even less by advanced protocol design. One millisecond corresponds to a round trip time of 100 kilometers in optical fiber, therefore lower latency would be beneficial for large amounts of local content.
10.0
8.0
(bps/Hz/cell)
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
HSPA today
LTE 2x2
LTEAdvanced 4x4
+ COMP
+ UE interference cancellation
+ Further innovations
Latency (ms) 25.0 20.0 15.0 10.0 5.0 0.0 HSPA LTE Beyond 4G 15.0 10.0 5.0 0.0
Beyond 4G
10x
We also expect that base station density will increase by a factor of 10 in areas with a large density of active users. Large numbers of femto cells will be deployed to improve home and small office coverage and offload traffic from macro cells. Additionally, a large installed base of WiFi Access Points (>500 million) will carry traffic, mainly indoors. The impact of the three enhancement topics, improvements in spectral efficiency, additional spectrum and large number of small base stations, will be to enable up to 1,000 times more capacity than today, as illustrated in Figure 9.
50 Mio
Spectrum (MHz) 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 2010 2020 10 8 6 4 2 0
2010
2020
10x
10x
10x
1000x
Figure 9. Technology capabilities allow 1000 times more data in 10 years time
34% CAPEX Savings 85,9m EUR (Over 6 years) 120 100 80 8 Beyond60 4G 40
e e
al
& t
a e
0,0
Indoors
WiFi
Indoors
Femto cell
Beyond 4G
one of the focus areas for the Beyond 4G air interface studies. SC-FDMA used in the LTE uplink maximizes coverage by maintaining a low peak to average power ratio to support efficient power amplifiers in devices. However, there is room for further coverage and/or power efficiency enhancements, for example high UL bandwidths (100 MHz) and carrier aggregation. User plane latency is the measure of the end-to-end performance of many applications. The minimum round trip time (RTT) of LTE is around 10 ms (Figure 7). It is generally accepted that latency must decrease in line with the increase in data rates. Hence, an RTT of the order of 0.1 1 ms needs to be considered as the initial target for a Beyond 4G system. It is obvious that if the radio can provide very small latency (such as 0.1 ms), that is only beneficial for content that is very close to the point of use. It is difficult to make major improvements in latency without impacting the air interface. The components of latency, such as frame structure, control signal timing, and HARQ, form the key building blocks of the air interface. Therefore, major improvements in U-plane latency imply considerable changes in the air interface. For example, an RTT requirement of 0.1 ms interprets to TTI lengths down to 10-25 s. This cannot be achieved with the current LTEAdvanced OFDMA numerology, but requires a more versatile approach.
10
Beyond 4G
The link performance in todays mobile broadband systems is often limited by interference from other elements of the system. Relatively primitive means to suppress such interference at the receiver side have already been introduced in state-of-the-art wirelesscommunication systems (e.g. HSPA+ 3i receiver). However, the increasing level of computationally-intensive signal processing, even in hand-held terminals, opens up the possibility of more advanced methods of interference suppression/elimination. An even more disruptive, but very challenging, technology step would be to extend current multi-antenna schemes, typically comprising just a few antenna ports at each node, to massive multi-antenna configurations. In an extreme case, this could consist of a myriad of cooperating antenna ports (for example in a much more distributed manner also known as immersed radio). Intercell interference cancellation and coordination can increase average data rates, but even better, these solutions can improve cell edge data rates.
The next generation wireless device will support a vast number of services with a powerful and complex communications engine. Radios in devices already support cellular, WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth. Additionally, international roaming requires devices to support a variety of radios/bands because globally available frequency bands are not consistent. As a result, the RF complexity in the device will increase drastically, requiring radios to support multiple bands and duplexing methods (FDD & TDD). In future, the radios in the device will perform local radio resource management and assist with network resource management. Device support for carrier aggregation and heterogeneous networks could enable simultaneous communication over multiple radio access technologies. The wireless device may also be a gateway for a multitude of sensors and machine type devices. It will perform spectrum sensing for capturing and analyzing the radio environment. The optimization of device power consumption is important in current devices and will remain a key factor in the future. Battery capacity improves very slowly compared to the evolution of other technologies.
Beyond 4G
11
The future of mobile communications will include a vast variety of communication nodes with various sets of requirements and priorities. Some will need to be designed primarily for quality of experience, some will bring the highest energy efficiency, while others may focus on robustness and security. This variety calls for major improvements in flexibility, both for the network and the architectural design of the nodes. The main cornerstones for the radio evolution are listed in Figure 11. This section has illustrated the technical enablers that will boost the practical user experience from a few Mbps to several Gbps. The ultimate target is to offer consistently higher useable data rates within a
limited bandwidth to a large number of customers. The technologies need to enable higher average data rates in the Uplink and Downlink with more bandwidth and more antennas. We also need higher efficiency to deliver more Gbps in a limited amount of spectrum. In dense areas, more capacity per square kilometer will need to be provided by increasing the density of small base stations and inherent offloading.
Figure 11. Main cornerstones for the long term radio evolution
Future (2020) Wide scale small cell dense deployments >100 BTS / km2
<100 EUR/BTS/year
12
Techno-Economical aspects
In future, CSPs are likely to increase infrastructure sharing. Virtualization will be a key technology in achieving this and already the concepts and basic building blocks have been tested. By the end of the decade, new business relationships, enabled by network resource virtualization and sharing, will introduce new opportunities and possibly new players into the value chain.
200 MHz 100 MHz 20 MHz
RF bandwidth increases
Macro
Micro
Pico/ Femto
Fingertip
The Techno-Economic balance between traffic growth and flat revenue is achieved by higher radio efficiency with smaller base stations. However, it is not enough to have lower base station cost, we also need to push down operational costs with low cost transport, low cost configuration and low cost optimization.
1000x capacity gain: 10x more BTS 10x spectral efficiency 10x spectrum
Flat TCO
1000x cost reduction: 10x BTS bandwidth 10x spectral efficiency 10x smaller BTS
Beyond 4G
13
14
Beyond 4G
Conclusion
Delivering the Gigabit Experience
Radio access technologies need significant advancements to meet the capacity and cost requirements predicted for 2020. We need to prepare to support a thousand-fold traffic increase from today with constant cost structure.
1000x growth Traffic Growth Up to 1000x
1000x capacity gain: - 10x more BTS The technology mix to address this - 10x spectral efficiency challenge will be a combination of a - 10x spectrum
TCO
large number of small base stations, extensive use of advanced antenna 1000x cost reduction: technologies, self-organizing networks - 10x BTS bandwidth enhanced with cognitive radio network, - 10x spectral efficiency wideband radios - 10x smaller BTS and wide use of available fiber optics networks for the backhaul and front-haul.
Flattish Revenue Growth
2020
Unified Network Extreme Automation Scattered Spectrum Smart Offloading Myriad of Cells Cooperation & Coordination Interference Spectrum Antenna clusters
Nokia Siemens Networks is at the forefront in developing and driving the most economical and powerful technologies and solutions together with the industry and research partners.
Abbreviations
3GPP Third Generation Partnership Project BTS Base Transceiver Station CoMP Co-ordinated Multipoint Processing CP Cyclic Prefix DL Downlink FDD Frequency Division Duplex GPS Global Positioning System HARQ Hybrid Automatic Repeat ReQuest HSDPA High Speed Downlink Packet Access HSPA High Speed Packet Access ITU-R International Telecommunication Union Radio communication sector IMT- Advanced International Mobile Telecommunications - Advanced KPI Key Performance Indicator LTE Long Term Evolution M2M Machine-to-machine MIMO Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output OFDMA Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access QoS Quality of Service RF Radio Frequency RTT Round Trip Time SC-FDMA Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access SON Self-Organizing Networks TDD Time Division Duplex UE User Equipment UL Uplink UMTS Universal Mobile Telecommunications System WRC World radio Conference
Beyond 4G
15
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