Is it the best of times or the worst of times for wireless? It depends on who asked at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). Ask the operators and they say that they’re being gored by the horns of falling revenue per user and the looming costs of 5G deployment. Ask just about anyone else, from designers to chip, sensor, test-equipment vendors and content developers, and these are definitely good times — and the best is yet to come.
It’s hard to sympathize with the operators: They’ve been gorging on users and protected spectrum since mobile began, and eventually the costs of 5G, in whatever form it takes, will again fall to users, though there may be some operator shakeouts and mergers between now and then. As the pending AT&T and Time Warner merger indicates, simply being the conduit for services and content won’t be enough to pay for future infrastructure investment: Original content and services are critical.
The angst over 5G costs was matched by the confusion over what form it will take and when it will be deployed. While it’s clearly the next stage in the evolution of wireless, it’s best described not by what it is or will be, but by its intent and what technologies it will comprise.
The goal is to provide the required data rates to every user for every device or system, regardless of environment, with the greatest possible spectral and power efficiency and lowest possible cost. The required data rates depend on the application: gigabit/second rates for high-definition video or virtual reality (VR) on a handset, or kilobits/s for IoT devices in the smart city.
To that end, the technologies include massive MIMO, beam forming, incorporation of millimeter-wave 28-GHz and 39-GHz bands, new forms of modulation that are currently being researched, and a host of other optimizations to support thousands of devices, seamless hand-offs, and low, sub-1-ms latency.
Latency is particularly important in light of the merging of the IoT and 5G. Current 3G and 4G networks with 25- to 50-ms latencies are good for classic data applications but fly in the face of the IoT, in which sensors and mobile systems often need to respond as close to real time as possible. Those mobile systems include connected automobiles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and varying levels of autonomy.
Meeting the needs of both 5G and IoT requires standards and partnerships, and the show was rife with work on both, with technology and test providers running to keep up. The NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) addition to the 3GPP Rel. 13 specification last June was both welcome and sudden, spurring fast work by test companies to develop test capabilities and protocols for NB-IoT to show them at MWC. Rohde & Schwarz, for example, took Qualcomm’s MDM9206 LTE modem and developed a reference implementation based around its CMW500 to show at MWC. The MDM9206 is a global Cat M1/Cat NB-1 dual-mode LTE modem.
Along with Intel, Samsung, MediaTek and others, Qualcomm is at the center of 5G, of course, and last year, it joined with operators to rally around the 5G New Radio effort, with the intent of realizing 5G by 2020. The initial target date was set around the Tokyo Olympics. At MWC, they re-rallied in a drive to accelerate that program to 2019.
Rasmus Hellberg, senior director of technical marketing at Qualcomm elaborated upon the company’s multipronged approach to 5G and LTE in general. Along with supporting the advance toward 5G — adding that it had already moved the needle beyond 1 Gbit/s to 1.2 Gbit/s — the company is also keen to help find new business models for LTE. This includes support of the MulteFire Alliance, which is promoting the development of LTE-based private networks in the unlicensed bands. The model is much like Wi-Fi, but with the performance advantages of LTE. These advantages include VoLTE, full mobility, coverage, capacity, and hyper-dense small-cell deployments.
Right before MWC, Qualcomm, GE Digital, and Nokia announced that they had demonstrated a private LTE network for industrial IoT (IIoT), a prime target application of the concept. The demo used LTE-TDD in the 3.5-GHz band in the U.S., also known as the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS). Globally, the 5-GHz band can also be used.
Best selfie phone ever
Among all the angst over 5G and the addition of IoT to the center of MWC, it’s easy to forget that the event has always been foremost about, well, phones. The organizers helped to keep it to the fore with the best of show award, won by Sony for its Xperia XZ Premium, but it was hard to ignore Huawei’s P10 (Fig. 1 ).
Fig. 1: While Sony’s Xperia XZ Premium won best of show, Huawei showcased its P10 as both a fashion accessory and the “best selfie phone ever.” (Image source: ClariTek.)
Promoted as the best selfie camera in the world, thanks to collaboration between Huawei and Leica, the phone combined features and style, making it a “must-have” accessory as well as a tool. Ironically, when pushed, the booth attendant admitted that she owned an iPhone.
Still, the P10 and the scores of other phones showcased at the event underscored the key features and functions, beyond the core processors, that are necessary for a design win in the next wave of smartphones.
Camera hardware and software are central, both for image capture and image processing hardware and software. CEVA’s booth showcased its IP in many of the devices on display at the event. Then come displays themselves, as well as the move to a new 18:9 aspect ratio; microphones and audio processing; fingerprint scanning and other biometric and security features; waterproof packaging; and sensors of all types.
The importance of sensors for phones isn’t lost on ams AG, which showed up to demonstrate the integration of advanced temperature sensing and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) detection on phones.
While temperature sensing has always been a feature on phones, ams’s approach incorporates proprietary algorithms that take inputs from other sources on the phone to quickly get an accurate reading of the ambient temperature, regardless of where the phone has been placed prior to the reading (such as in a pocket). The main issue that ams is tackling along with sensing consistency is packaging, and for that, it is relying upon its recent acquisition of Heptagon last year.
4G life extension, SDN, and NFV
The surface buzz at MWC also hid the drive to extend the life of 4G networks, which still have not reached their potential, either geographically or technically. Extending the use of these networks by incorporating many of the technologies called out for 5G is clearly the smartest route for many operators.
However, migration must begin, and it is taking place at the backend, using software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). These allow services to be deployed dynamically, across telecom networks and the datacenter. Lanner was on hand at MWC to show a carrier-grade system — the HTCA-6200 — that enables this migration. Lanner also worked with NEC/Netcracker Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) to show how to create, deploy, and monetize virtualized B2B services.
The tumultuous world of mobility and IoT will remain so for some time to come, so for providers of electronic products and solutions, these are the best of times, especially for the development of sensing and connectivity capabilities on the front end and network optimization on the back end. However, a flexible, solution-oriented approach, with an eye on partnerships, is critical as we’re in an accelerating stage of evolution.
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