16 Sep 2010

Future Wireless Technology - a view from Qualcomm

A view of the future of wireless and mobile technology - a meeting held at the Science Museum London for the 25th anniversary of Qualcomm.

With Qualcomm celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, they organised their second annual "Innovation Qualcomm" event.

This event was held at the Science Museum in London, alongside many famous developments that have been undertaken in years gone by.

This enabled them to showcase their products and reveal their view of the future of wireless and mobile or cellular technology.

The keynote address was given by the Qualcomm CEO, Dr Paul Jacobs and he revealed some of the thinking of the way that they believe mobile, cellular and wireless technology will develop in the coming years.

Data explosion

A review of the past 25 years demonstrated how far wireless and mobile technology has developed in the last 25 years. In 1985, when Qualcomm was founded the 1G telecommunications systems were just starting to gain ground. Now, cellular technology has grown to the extent that there are over 4 billion subscribers and users are spread worldwide - the rate of growth would never have been estimated in the early days of cellular technology.

Today, the data traffic is growing a huge rate - it. estimated that 85% of the world's cellular operators have currently installed 3G technology, thereby enabling data traffic to be sent. As a result, it is estimated that by 2014, the monthly data traffic will exceed that for the whole of 2008. HSPA is new being widely deployed proving a robust platform for high speed data downloads.

With the expected data explosion, future wireless technology is now starting to be deployed in the form of LTE. As Paul Jacobs mentioned, LTE offers little improvement over HSPA+ in terms of spectral efficiency, however it does allow wider bandwidths to be used. Also LTE Advanced will enable spectral aggregation to be achieved where disparate elements of spectrum can be aggregated. As this will enable a larger "pipe" to be used for transporting he data, it will enable higher data rates to be supported.

Backhaul and networks for future wireless

While the radio interface has been improved with LTE, the network also needs addressing to ensure that it can handle the greatly increased levels of data.

A number of methods of catering for the higher data rates have been addressed in LTE.

One way is to have a much flatter network in this way, not all the data is passed directly into the core - much of it can pass around the periphery. Also more intelligence is contained within the base stations, again reducing the load on the core network entities.

Other ideas such as data-offload are also part of the central strategy for LTE as a whole. Items such as femtocells as well as offload via Wi-Fi to through broadband connections. Not only do these reduce the size of the cells and in this way provide additional capacity, but they also improve the coverage within the building in which they are located..

The use of both femto and macro cell technology provides some challenges for the developers of the networks, but these are being addressed.

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