ETSI Workshop on 3GPP release 8 IMS Implementation, Deployment & Testing

This workshop provides ETSI/3GPP members a unique opportunity to air openly and honestly issues of implementation and inter-operability when migrating networks towards broadband IMS and LTE. Telcos, vendors and integrators are coming together to share experiences and feed requirements to future interworking tests.

Light Reading Webinar: TD-LTE Technology Roadmap & Ecosystem Development 2010

- Date: Tuesday, September 28, 2010
- Time: 10:00 a.m. New York / 3:00 p.m. London
- Overview: After the successful end-to-end service demonstrations in the showcase network during the Shanghai World Expo, China Mobile is now preparing for large-scale TD-LTE field trials in selected cities in China, with a population coverage of more than 100 million. Now that the 3GPP LTE standard includes both LTE-FDD and TD-LTE, a growing ecosystem of enabling technology, infrastructure equipment and device vendors are preparing for the commercial deployment of TD-LTE services beginning in multiple countries beginning in 2012. This custom Webinar brings together China Mobile and four leading vendors to discuss the TD-LTE technology roadmap and ecosystem development in 2010 and beyond.

Free LTE tutorial at IEEE Communications Society

A talk on LTE PHY layer by Dr. Stefan Parkvall of Ericsson Research. Registration required.

Technical papers on LTE-Advanced and 802.16m in Aug. 2010 issue of IEEE Communications Magazine

This month's issue of IEEE Communications Magazine is offering technical papers on LTE-Advanced and 802.16m.

The titles of the papers are as follows:

- IMT-Advanced Relay Standards
- Multicarrier Technology for 4G WiMAX System
- Carrier Aggregation Framework in 3GPP LTE-Advanced
- Toward Enhanced Mobile Video Services over WiMAX and LTE
- Advanced Handover Schemes in IMT-Advanced Systems
- Interference Management for 4G Cellular Standards

My LTE tutorial "Towards 4G: Technical Overview of LTE and WiMAX" at this year's IEEE WCNC available for viewing

My LTE tutorial at this year's IEEE WCNC (Towards 4G-Technical Overview of LTE & WiMAX) is now available for viewing at IEEE Communications Society's conference webcast site.

Russian Operators Look to LTE

Source: 3GPP
In a pre-conference seminar dedicated to the technology behind the successful LTE Standards, Russian telecommunications experts have discussed the Regions’ needs with 3GPP Chairmen and leading officials.

3G Americas Publishes Valuable Resource on MIMO and Smart Antennas for LTE

Source: 3GPP press release
3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing the GSM family of technologies including LTE, today announced that it has published an educational white paper titled, MIMO and Smart Antennas for 3G and 4G Wireless Systems: Practical Aspects and Deployment Considerations. The report is a complete tutorial reference document that outlines the considerable importance of various smart antenna schemes for improving the capacity and coverage of the emerging generations of wireless networks.

The paper can be downloaded from here.

Latin American Operators at LTE Summit

Source: 3GPP
3GPP and 3G Americas held a LTE Standards workshop in advance of this years’ LTE Latin America Conference, held in Rio de Janeiro 26-28 April.

Speakers from Operators and Manufacturers’ looked at the huge potential for HSPA and LTE networks and discussed Standards and Regulatory issues that are affecting LTE Roadmaps for the Latin America Region.

Topics such as equipment availability and spectrum scarcity were high on the agenda, along with discussions on systems architecture evolution and backhaul issues. The presentations from the workshop are available on-line.

LTE Deployments Energize Prospects for the IMS Test and Monitoring Equipment Market, Finds Frost & Sullivan

Source: Frost & Sullivan press release
Despite the tough economic conditions, the global Internet protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) test and monitoring equipment market is witnessing growth, largely owed to the compelling services IMS infrastructure is capable of enabling. An upturn in the macro economic situation could enliven the outlook for this market further. Escalating need for high bandwidth is likely to unleash more long-term evolution (LTE) deployments in the next couple of years, opening new avenues of opportunity for vendors in the IMS test and monitoring equipment space.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, World IMS Test and Monitoring Equipment Market, finds that the market earned revenues of over $308.9 million in 2008 and estimates this to reach $968.9 million in 2013.

ATIS Webinar: Moving to LTE (May 4, 2010)

ATIS - The North American Standards Partner in 3GPP - have an on-line webinar scheduled for May 4, 2010, at 10:00 EDT.

Hank Kafta, AT&T’s VP for Network Architecture will speak along side 3GPP’s Adrian Scrase, to discuss the implications of the Freeze of 3GPP Release 9, and how it delivers the full feature set for LTE networks.

The Webinar will be moderated by Keith Mallinson, of WiseHarbor, himself a leading expert and analyst in the field of mobile telecommunications.

The one hour long webinar will highlight AT&T’s use of the Standards and how the operator plans to migrate to LTE.

Adrian Scrase, Head 3GPP Mobile Competence Center, will also give details of progress on Release 10, with it’s focus on moving LTE towards its’ Advanced state, with targets aligned to the IMT-Advanced requirements for future 4G Systems.

A blog post on LTE spectrum challenges by Martin Sauter of WirelessMoves

Martin over at WirelessMoves blog has an interesting/informative post on current status and challenges of LTE spectrum. Go check it out.

Verizon Wireless updates 700 MHz C-Block LTE specifications

Source: Verizon Wireless
Registration and sign-in required in order to download the document.

Technical Papers on LTE-Advanced in Feb. 2010 issue of IEEE Communications Magazine

The list of the papers are as follows:

* Cooperative MIMO Channel Models: A Survey - The authors provide an overview of the state of the art in cooperative MIMO channel modeling. Cheng-Xiang Wang and Xuemin Hong, Heriot-Watt University; Xiaohu Ge, Huazhong University of Science and Technology; Xiang Cheng, Heriot-Watt University; Gong Zhang, Huawei Technologies Company Ltd.; John Thompson, The University of Edinburgh

* Carrier Aggregation for LTE-Advanced Mobile Communication Systems - The authors review continuous and non-continuous CA techniques, and present two data aggregation schemes in the physical and medium access control layers. Guangxiang Yuan, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and University College London; Xiang Zhang and Wenbo Wang, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications; Yang Yang, University College London and Chinese Academy of Sciences


* Self-Configuration and Self-Optimization for LTE Networks - The authors introduce the market and technological perspectives for SONs, and then they focus on the self-configuration procedure. Honglin Hu and Jian Zhang, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Xiaoying Zheng, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Southeast University; Yang Yang, Chinese Academy of Sciences and University College London; Ping Wu, Uppsala University

* Quality-Driven Cross-Layer Optimized Video Delivery over LTE - The authors present a new QoS-aware LTE OFDMA scheduling algorithm for wireless real-time video delivery over the downlink of LTE cellular networks to achieve the best user-perceived video quality under the given application delay constraint. Haiyan Luo, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Song Ci, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Chinese Academy of Sciences; Dalei Wu, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jianjun Wu, Huawei Technologies; Hui Tang, Chinese Academy of Sciences

3G Americas Publishes Renowned Report on HSPA+, LTE and LTE-Advanced Wireless Standards

Source: 3G Americas press release
3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing the GSM family of technologies including LTE, today announced that it has published its highly anticipated resource report on 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards and their evolution to IMT-Advanced, or 4G. The white paper, 3GPP Mobile Broadband Innovation Path to 4G: Release 9, Release 10 and Beyond: HSPA+, SAE/LTE and LTE-Advanced, provides in-depth examination of 3GPP technology standards from a technical, business and applications standpoint.

The report can be downloaded from here.

Huawei and O2 UK trial live LTE services

Recording: Verizon Wireless web conference regarding the Wireless 700 MHz C-block Specifications and Certification Process Webcast (Jan. 20, 2010)

IMT-Advanced Workshop (12/23/2009)

The presentations are available to download from 3GPP's website. They provide a nice summary of current R-10 LTE-Advanced standardization. The following are the presentations:

* LTE technologies (Takehiro Nakamura: TSG-RAN Chair, NTT DOCOMO)
* Physical layer aspects (Matthew Baker: RAN WG1 Chair, Alcatel-Lucent)
* Layer 2 and 3 aspects (Magnus Lindström: RAN WG2, Ericsson)
* RAN architecture aspects (Dino Flore: RAN WG3 Chair, Qualcomm)
* RF aspects (Takaharu Nakamura: RAN WG4 Chair, Fujitsu)
* 3GPP Self evaluation methodology and results (Tetsushi Abe: RAN WG1 Vice-Chair, NTT DOCOMO)

3G Americas Publishes Report on LTE SON Self-Optimizing / Self-Organizing Networks to Improve Network Management

Source: 3G Americas press release
3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing the GSM family of technologies including LTE, today announced that it has published an educational report titled, The Benefits of SON in LTE, to increase understanding of the improvements in network management that have been developed through 3GPP standards – Release 8, Release 9 and beyond.

Technical papers on LTE-Advanced and TD-LTE in this month's (DEC. 2009) IEEE Communications Magazine

Two papers are:

* Device-to-Device Communication as an Underlay to LTE-Advanced Networks: The authors study device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying a 3GPP LTE-Advanced cellular network as an enabler of local services with limited interference impact on the primary cellular network. The approach of the study is tight integration of D2D communication into an LTE-Advanced network. - Klaus Doppler, Mika Rinne, Carl Wijting, Cássio B. Ribeiro, and Klaus Hugl, Nokia Research Center

* Technologies and Standards for TD-SCDMA Evolutions to IMT-Advanced: The current TD-SCDMA commercialization in China brings about many issues concerning the implementation of TD-SCDMA technology, the market, and its applications. In order to make TD-SCDMA successful, evolution from the current TD-SCDMA standards to International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced are anticipated. TD-SCDMA standards and technologies will take a home-made evolution path in China, aiming at a smooth migration to the next-generation mobile communication system. - Mugen Peng and Wenbo Wang, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

LTE Backhaul: Meeting Operator Requirements

Source: Total Telecom
Transport providers face substantial challenges in realizing LTE’s business and technological potential. Ensuring accurate timing and synchronization over packet networks; smartly managing traffic in LTE’s flat architecture; providing adequate resiliency for 4G critical applications; and enabling backward compatibility for service continuity of 2G and 3G traffic are a few examples of the critical issues that need addressing. Nevertheless, backhaul providers need to address additional issues that are related to multi-operator colocation and customized backhaul SLAs. This paper reviews the implications of LTE’s “intelligence crunch” for backhaul providers and discusses how Carrier Ethernet can be used to smartly overcome migration hurdles.