An introduction to the day and to the research of Mobile VCE

Improved spectrum efficiency has arguably been the primary goal of wireless telecommunications as it proliferated and globalised over the past two decades. This talk will give an industrial view of the key questions and issues that Mobile VCE's Delivery Efficiency programme has sought to address.

Designing Seamless Wireless Networks in a Future of Unpredictable Service Requirements:
Commencing with a whistle-stop tour of FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, OFDMA, SDMA, IDMA and CCMA, this overview will present a road-map of both classic and unorthodox transceiver signal processing techniques applicable to both single and multiple-antenna-aided solutions. It reaches out to the challenging topic of overall system effificiency improvements using low-power cross-layer signal processing.

Proposals to improve effificiency have considered cognitive radio as an enabling technology. This presentation explores the potential benefifits of intelligent, environment-aware, techniques implemented in terminals and network equipment to manage spectrum sharing between users to improve effificiency of spectrum use. A range of algorithms has been developed and investigated in order to quantify the benefifits of spectrum sharing in different scenarios.

A simple low-level approach was for many years the way to secure advances in spectrum efficiency; as systems have grown more complex, so the opportunities offered by cross-layer approaches to optimise link and system capacity have increasingly been recognised. This talk will present key research results on cross-layer optimisation in fast packet scheduling, packet routing and multihop communications. Important recommendations resulting from this cross-layer optimisation work will be presented and discussed.

Mobile VCE’s Core 5 Green Radio Programme seeks to apply system-wide thinking, challenging basic assumptions, to identify optimal architectures and techniques to secure 100x reductions in energy consumption.

Operators have made significant CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) commitments in the recent past to energy reduction. The gyrations in energy costs in 2008 also brought into focus the need, and opportunity, to reduce Opex. So, what are network operators looking for from this programme?

Research to reduce the energy consumption of wireless networks, taking a holistic and systemic approach, requires an approach that allow an appropriate choice of radio access architecture and associated backhaul. This talk will describe the technical approach, energy metrics & models, and initial findings.

Complementing the Green Radio work on architectures and metrics, the work on techniques to reduce the power consumption in individual network devices will be described. Planned strategies and early findings will be described.

The term Green Radio was new when first coined by the Mobile VCE Visions Group in early 2007 - today the phrase has been widely adopted and the need for it has become mainstream. The goal of this panel discussion will be to explore perspectives on what industry see as needed and by when, and to elicit their responses to the research described earlier in the day.