The Core 1 Programme : Objectives & Results

A £3m programme, funded by Industrial Members of Mobile VCE and supported by EPSRC Grant GR/L23888, the Core 1 Research Programme addressed Future Mobile Communications, securing achievements in four Work Areas, as detailed below.     The research yielded in excess of 20 patent applications and over 70 technical papers, which have either been published or submitted for publication or presentation at peer-refereed conferences or in journals.

Services

Objectives: Service, source, traffic and usage models for future mobile multimedia networks

Key Achievements:

Creation of a library of analytical models & simulations which comprise a toolkit for understanding relationships between users' behaviour, the services they use and the resulting network performance and configurations, eg

• A new user mobility models (and techniques) for large populations in time, space and service usage

• Multimedia source model characterisation and resultant teletraffic profiles, and their network load implications

• Enterprise model of mobile service provision - key management functions and interfaces between them

• Compilation of traffic data for mobile multimedia applications, to validate analytical & simulated results

Networks

Objectives: Algorithms, schemes and techniques for mobility management, media access control and resource management to provide QoS guarantees via multi-frequency/-layered cells /-operator /-service & -content providers

Key Achievements:

• Macro-mobility management in heterogeneous networks (eg GSM/Mobile IP), minimising signalling loads

• Handover techniques for hierarchical cell structures, to equalise traffic distributions

• Soft handover algorithms offering improved performance and capacity increase

• MAC protocol, supporting dynamic Bandwidth-on-Demand

• MAC scheduler for multimedia services with different QoS requirements, including deadline-oriented priorities

• MAC protocol supporting QoS guarantees for multimedia services for CSMA and derivative systems

• Generic resource management framework allowing trade-off management between radio resources and QoS

• Market-based system allowing dynamic selection of the serving operator according to the quality / price offer.

• Pre-emptive resource allocation by dynamic spectrum partitioning, allowing resource prioritisation for users

• ATM-based protocol stack & signalling optimised for wireless throughput, minimising signalling and delay

• Virtual bus architecture for routing optimisation of signalling traffic between micro / macro cellular systems

Terminals

Objectives: Design approaches, hard/software architectures and flexible reconfiguration of multimedia terminals.

Key Achievements:

• Design techniques and specific video modems, supporting OFDM and CDMA, incl. performance results

• Optimised MUD receiver architecture, improved FFT acquisition techniques, and their combination

• Soft reconfiguration approaches to hardware equalisation and to protocol stacks for software radio

• Reconfigurable RF hardware techniques - active inductors

• Adaptive antenna technique for handset terminals, offering 10dB transmit power reduction

Radio Environment

Objectives: Radio configurations, with a particular focus on indoor/outdoor, providing flexible bandwidth services, at high spectral efficiency, while allowing variable, defined, QoS

Key Achievements:

• Specific user, traffic, service & physical scenarios as the basis for on-going system comparison

• Database of indoor-outdoor propagation measurement, narrow- & broad-band, over 0.45-12 GHz

• Improved wideband propagation models, validated against measurements - including building penetration, statistical dispersion model, correlations of shadowing & temporal variations and polarisation & space diversity

• A system simulator, embodying the models and capable of simulating the actions of mobile users accessing a variety of services via specific radio architectures, thereby enabling their evaluation.

• Analysis of spectrum and power efficient technologies / architectures for multimedia service delivery

• Performance results for 3 architectures - Hierarchical Cell Structures, Intelligent Relays, Intelligent Picocells

• Technique offering improved estimation of the CIR of the mobile propagation channel

Revised: 26th February 2003	MobileVCE Home	Copyright © 2003 Mobile VCE.