FEATURE: NEXT GENERATION RADIO FEATURE
Are you up to speed with the latest developments in radio access technology – the possible bearers for the delivery of very fast data in the future? Michelle Donegan is, and she runs a keen eye over the contenders. Amidst the 5G hype, there are some real technological advances underway in radio communications. Whether 5G will embody a revolution in radio technology or an evolution of existing technologies or both, the following highlights some of the more radical ideas that have emerged recently in the quest for ever higher capacity, lower latency, and cost efficiency in future wireless networks.
Personal Cells for All? With a certain Silicon Valley panache, serial entrepreneur Steve Perlman (of Quicktime and WebTV fame) launched Artemis Networks in February this year with claims that pCell technology could overcome the capacity limitations of today’s cellular networks. pCell - short for “personal cell” - is based on distributed input distributed output (DIDO), which Perlman first revealed in 2011. The idea is that small, discreetly located pWave radios, each with multiple antennas, transmit radio signals that deliberately interfere to synthesize tiny pCells with a diameter of just one centimetre around each mobile device. Rather than sharing capacity from one large base station, 16 TMNQUARTERLY
each user would have an unshared pCell that provides full LTE capacity. Software defined radios, cloud RAN, IP fronthaul and data centres with Linuxbased servers are all part of the pCell picture. The pCell technology can operate in licensed or unlicensed spectrum and Perlman has hinted that there are bigger applications for the technology beyond mobile broadband. Artemis selected PureWave Networks to supply the pWave radios for upcoming trials planned for the fourth quarter of 2014. Some suggest that the company’s technology is related to known concepts such as network MIMO, massive MIMO or coordinated multipoint (CoMP).