4G Wireless Begins to Take Shape

Sixto Ortiz Jr.

he mobile phone has evolved from a basic device that just makes calls to a multifunctional gadget like the iPhone, which can also retrieve e-mail, store and play music, surf the Web, and stream video les. This reects the advance in mobile technology from the 1980s rst-generation (1G) circuit-switched analog systems to todays 3G and even 3.5G digital technologies. As always, service providers and users are looking for wireless technologies that offer better performance and more advanced capabilities than their predecessors and that thereby better approximate the experience of using wireline technologies. With this in mind, the International Telecommunication Union is working on a 4G cellular standard, which the ITU plans to release in a couple of years. The technology would enable IP-based voice, data, and streaming multimedia at higher speedstheoretically up to 288 megabits per second for mobile users than current cellular approaches. The approach could go beyond the cell phone and provide mobile data services to consumer-electronics and other devices that currently either dont have Web access or dont work wirelessly, said Ali Tabassi, vice president of technology development at communications carrier Sprint Nextel. These services could include the sending of photos from cameras
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to printers and improved videoconferencing from laptops. Now, though, it is unclear exactly how 4G will look, noted Gemma Tedesco, a senior analyst with market-research rm In-Stat. The principal candidates for ITU adoption, those supported by major companies or standards organizations, appear to be Long-Term Evolution (LTE), Ultramobile Broadband (UMB), and IEEE 802.16m (WiMax II). Several service providers are already experimenting with or soon plan to experiment with potential 4G technologies. However, 4G implementation could take several years, partly because of the ITUs adoption process and because carriers want to recover their considerable investments in 3G technology. Meanwhile, 4G will have to overcome technical and marketplace challenges to become successful.

Communications) and CDMA (code division multiple access). GSM is based on TDMA (time division, multiple access) technology, which splits a frequency band into multiple channels. It then increases each channels bandwidth by dividing it into multiple timebased slots, each of which can carry a different transmission. CDMA assigns codes to separate transmissions, which can then run at the same time on a single channel spread across a wide band of radio frequencies. Each receiver decodes only the transmission it is supposed to work with. GSM and CDMA also differ in areas such as the frequency ranges and codecs they use. The GSM family includes 2.5G technology General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), the 2.75G Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), and the 3G wideband CDMA (WCDMA) and High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA). CDMA technologies include 3G approaches CDMA2000 and Evolution Data Only (EV-DO). According to Tedesco, as of the second quarter of this year, GSM had 2.3 billion subscribers worldwide, while CDMA had 450 million.

User demand
Sprint Nextels Tabassi sees two trends driving the development of 4G technologies: the continuing growth of wireless usage and the rise of household broadband Internet subscriptions. Many users want wireless technologies that approximate the experience they have at home with their high-speed wireline services. There is also demand for the servicessuch as better-quality, faster video viewing and quicker online-content downloading, even for mobile users with handheld devicesthat 4G would enable, according to In-Stats Tedesco.

DRIVING 4G
Today, the worlds cellular technologies belong to two major families: GSM (Global System for Mobile
Published by the IEEE Computer Society

Technical needs
3G technology allows coverage only over a large area from one or

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more cell towers. However, carriers and users want a wireless technology that offers both wide-area and small-area, Wi-Fi-like, hotspot approaches. This would let carriers offerand thereby enable users to obtainboth wide- and narrow-area services from a single device utilizing a single network, said Sprint Nextels Tabassi. Users could choose to work with whichever service is fastest and otherwise best suits their needs, he added. Meanwhile, researchers have developed more spectrally efficient modulation schemes for encoding data onto carrier waves, but they wont work with existing 3G or 3.5G infrastructures. According to Tabassi, modulation schemes such as 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation are more efcient because each transmitted unit conveys six data bits, instead of the older 16 QAMs four bits or Quadrature Phase Shift Keyings two bits. Higher-order modulation schemes like 64 QAM require redesigned or retrotted receivers to work with the new, more complex technologies, which, for example, have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than earlier approaches.

Transmitter Digital signal processing

Receiver Digital signal processing

Figure 1. 4G wireless will use multiple-input, multiple-output technology. MIMO sends a transmission from two or more antennas to reect off objects and follow multiple paths to a receiver that also uses two or more antennas. Putting data on multiple signal paths increases the amount of information a system can carry and the number of users it can serve. Also, the approach lets a system divide a data set into parts that are sent over multiple paths in parallel, thereby speeding up the transmission.

4G AND THE ITU

LTE, UBM, and IEEE 802.16m are the principal 4G candidates in part because they are supported by major companies and standards organizations. In addition, proponents deliberately developed the three approaches in conformance with the anticipated ITU 4G requirements, noted Colin Langtry, counselor for the organizations Study Group 8. The ITUs Radiocommunication Sector has yet to release 4Gs ofcial denition or base requirements. According to In-Stats Tedesco, the ITU-R is expected to require the technology, which it calls ITUAdvanced, to support data rates of at least 100 Mbps and use orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), a multiuser ver-

sion of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. OFDM increases bandwidth by splitting a data-bearing radio signal into smaller signal sets and modulating each onto a different subcarrier, transmitting them simultaneously at different frequencies. The subcarriers are spaced orthogonally and thus large numbers can be packed closely together with minimal interference. All 4G technologies will be IPbased and packet switched. Some 3G and 3.5G technologiessuch as WCDMA, HSPA, CDMA2000, and EV-DOwere built on 2G cellular technologies optimized to handle circuit-switched voice communications, not packet-based data, noted Tedesco. The 4G candidates will be radiobased so systems will include the same basic elements: transmitters, receivers, antennas, cell towers, base stations, network gateways, and chips to handle each technologys approach to modulation. Chips also handle tasks such as radio-link control, designed to ensure data packets are received in the correct order; IP-packet classication, which provides quality of service by identifying the priority of data in packets based on header information; and admission control, which determines if a network has sufficient resources to accommodate users service requests. The three candidates work with various antenna approaches, including multiple input, multiple output.

MIMO uses multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver to improve performance, as Figure 1 shows.

The ITU process

The ITU-R has not finalized the 4G adoption process or timetable, noted Langtry. The process will include a call for proposals to be released next year, at which point candidates other than LTE, UMB, and WiMax II could be submitted. The ITU will then assess all submissions, review the assessments, select one or more candidate technologies, and develop and approve standards. The ITU-R will select candidate technologies in 2008 or 2009 and develop detailed specifications in 2009 or 2010, according to Langtry. Vendors could begin official implementation between 2010 and 2012, with wide deployment occurring by 2015, he said. 4G technologies would provide higher data rates largely via the use of wide transmission channels, which enable the sending of more information, and techniques such as MIMO, according to Eduardo Esteves, Qualcomms senior director of technical marketing.

Long-Term Evolution
The Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)a GSM-oriented consortium of Asian, European, and North American telecommunications standards organizationsis developing LTE.
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Ericsson has been LTEs most vocal proponent. Numerous other equipment vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola and service providers such as AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, and Verizon Wireless also back the technology, said Hkan Djuphammar, Ericssons vice president of systems architecture for corporate technology. LTE builds on GSM technology thereby easing migration for the many providers that work with the technologybut uses an OFDMbased air interface, explained Djuphammar. LTE provides spectrum exibility because it can be deployed in frequency bands between 1.25 and 20 MHz wide. The technologys maximum data rate is expected to be 250 Mbps in a channel 20-MHz wide. LTE differs from other 4G candidate technologies in that rather than using pure OFDMA on the uplink, as it does on the downlink, it utilizes a derivative, single-carrier frequency division multiple access, to enhance power efficiency and conserve mobile devices battery life.

IEEE 802.16m
WiMax II is the only 4G approach built on an existing OFDMA technology. It is based on IEEE 802.16e, which added mobility to the previous WiMax standard, designed mainly for fixed operations, noted Tim Sweeney, director of Intels mobile WiMax eld trials. IEEE 802.16 is a long-range, xed and wireless, metropolitan-area communications technology also known as WiMax (worldwide interoperability for microwave access). It operates in frequencies between 10 and 66 GHz.

as NTT DoCoMo and Sprint Nextel are conducting technology trials of potential approaches to understand how to work with them and increase their throughput.

Barriers
It is unclear whether 4G costs will hinder adoption. Factors such as the price of cell towers and equipment installation and production-related economies of scale will affect the technologys cost to consumers, said Esteves. Thus, the transition to 4G technology could be delayed by the need for carriers to buy new equipment, even for those moving to extensions of 3G technologies they currently use. Generally, though, he noted, transmission costs are lower for wireless technologies that are more spectrally efcient, as 4G promises to be. In-Stats Tedesco said most vendors expect that none of the 4G technologies will initially have real-world data rates as high as 100 Mbps. It may take several years and enhancements to get throughput to this level, Tedesco explained. And to achieve this speed, she said, carriers would have to transmit over wide frequency slices, which could be difcult because of limited spectrum availability. Meanwhile, carriers are still trying to recover their considerable investments in 3G spectrum and equipment. 3Gs disappointing performance has slowed customer adoption and thus the investment-recovery process, Tedesco noted. In fact, she predicted that technologies such as EV-DO and HSPA wont become dominant until 2011 or 2012. According to her, many handsets using 3G or 3.5G technologies have small processors that dont handle switching between multiple applications or downloading video well, despite the available network speed. Thus, she said, handsets will have to improve before many users will even think about paying for high-speed data services.

Although there is no standard yet, companies are already preparing to work with 4G wireless technology.
The original WiMax has a long transmission rangeup to 50 kilometersbecause regulations allow systems to transmit at high power rates and because its use of directional antennas produces focused signals. An IEEE Task Group is working on IEEE 802.16m, also called WiMax II, and could adopt it as a standard during the next year or two. This would let WiMax, originally adopted as a last-mile Internetaccess approach, also work in cellular systems. As planned, the technology will offer data rates up to 100 Mbps for mobile applications and 1 Gbps for stationary users. The transmission range for WiMax II will be between 2 kilometers in urban environments and 10 kilometers in rural areas. Intel is the leading proponent of using WiMax II for 4G systems, a strategy that Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, and other WiMax Forum members also support.

Ultra Mobile Broadband

The 3GPP 2a CDMA-oriented consortium (not to be confused with the 3GPP) of Asian and North American standards organizations as well as companies such as AlcatelLucent, Apple, Motorola, NEC, and Verizon Wirelessis the leading UMB proponent. 3GPP2 member Qualcomm is championing this effort, although the company is also looking into LTE, said Esteves. The CDMA-based UMB could be deployed in frequency bands between 1.25 and 20 MHz wide and works in many frequency ranges. UMB offers peak data rates for mobile users of 288 Mbps downstream and 75 Mbps upstream for transmissions using 20-MHz-wide channels, said Esteves. The technology would provide a transition path for CDMA-based carriers.
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4GS FUTURE
Even though the ITU hasnt dened 4G technology, carriers such

Eventually, carriers could extend the life of their current 3G investments by enhancing the technology with 3.5G capabilities, which could further delay 4G deployment.

ndustry observers speculate that ultimately, 4G could end up as a combination of different approaches. Moreover, they say, different carriers could simply deploy the technology of their choice, regardless of standardization. According to Tedesco, most operators plan to deploy 4G in urban areas, where there are more corporate, consumer, and other users who are willing to pay for high-speed mobile data services.

Carriers will continue offering 3G and 3.5G services as they phase in 4G offerings. This will not only let them continue broad coverage, including in areas without 4G, but will also help them recover their 3G investments. Users may well transition to 4G technologies that are extensions of the 3G and 3.5G approaches they currently use, according to Tedesco. CDMA operators are prevalent in Africa, Latin America, South Korea, and the US, and they thus may transition to UMB. Europe is dominated by GSM operators, who will likely move to LTE and not adopt WiMax II quickly, Tedesco said. Nonetheless, some carriers in other parts of the world may well like the WiMax II approach. How-

ever, because GSM and CDMA are already widely used, she said, they initially will probably be more popular than WiMax II. Nonetheless, Tedesco added, the marketplace wont be dominated by just one 4G technology. And signicant 4G adoption may not occur until the standards process plays out and vendors have begun recovering their investments in 3G and 3.5G technology.
Sixto Ortiz Jr. is a freelance technology writer based in Spring, Texas. Contact him at sortiz1965@gmail.com.
Editor: Lee Garber, Computer, l.garber@computer.org

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