Trends Point to All Around Improvement in Wireless Infrastructure

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By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor 

A number of emerging technology trends are going to greatly improve wireless infrastructure, according to a recent webinar, Emerging Trends in Wireless Infrastructure, sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz, which featured Dr. Jeffrey Reed, Professor at Virginia Tech, and Nishrit Tripani, R&D Strategy, Samsung Research America, and faculty member at Virginia Tech.

Wireless infrastructure trends can be categorized into four distinct areas: spectrum, densification and coverage extension, virtualization and cloudification, and network customization and intelligence, according to the webinar.

One of the trends that delineate 5G from 4G is the use of higher spectrum, according to Reed. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) separates 5G spectrum into two bands: FR1 (4.1 GHz to 7.125 GHz) and FR2 (24.25 GHz to 52.6 GHz). “Of the 50 bands that are allocated to support 5G,” Reed said, “the majority of deployments are in FR1, but FR2 is picking up steam, particularly in the United States and in Korea where we’re seeing access to large amounts of unlicensed spectrum up to about 60 GHz.”

He said the trend toward using shared spectrum, such as in the Citizens Broadband Radio Service, can enable enterprise networks or other non-public networks. “If you have access to your own specialized spectrum, you’re able to have better quality assurance guarantees compared to the unlicensed approach,” Reed said.

Tripani noted that active antenna systems have become more popular. With the packet losses inherent with higher spectrum bands, smaller cells are required to increase the capacity and throughput in an area. The three major classes of active antenna techniques are beamforming, single-user multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) and multiuser MIMO. “With these active antenna systems, we can do high-gain beams, which make these small cells more economically viable, because now we get much better performance,” he said.

The 3GPP continues to improve active antenna technology, according to Tripani. “For example, we will try to reduce the overhead of reference signals and reduce the peak-to-average power ratio of reference signals,” he said. “Then, to extend the scope of antennas, we will support multiple transmission and reception points and multiple panels.”

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), which allows software to be separated from hardware in conjunction with proprietary or open-source software, will reduce the costs of networking through the use of generic commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware, Tripani said, and the speed that networks can be upgraded will be increased through the independent evolution of hardware and software, as well.

“With the independent development of hardware and software, if a faster processor becomes available, we can replace the existing slow hardware with new hardware,” Tripani said. “Similarly, if a new software version becomes available, we can simply upload it and replace the out-of-date version, and so we can be more agile and change things quickly.” Fast evolution can lead to economies of scale, scalability and flexibility in the network, he added.

Another trend in virtualization is software defined networking (SDN), which centralizes networking intelligence to determine optimal routes and utilizes simple, low-cost switches. “So, if we have some congestion in one part of the network, with SDN using a centralized controller we can figure out the optimal route that will avoid that network congestion,” Tripani said. “That’s the beauty of having a more centralized view of the overall network.”

Reed said network customization and intelligence is his personal favorite, because with 5G the network can be customized using network slicing.

“Network slicing provides the ability to create a customized, logical network with shared infrastructure,” Reed said. “It is a technology-based method for allowing network sharing, where you have service providers make use of the same elements of the infrastructure or exactly the same infrastructure, because they’re separated in a logical way.” There is the potential for millions of customized network slices, which run from the RAN through the network transport to the core, he added.

The quality of service (QoS) in a network slice can be customized for specific applications. In fact, the 3GPP has defined the QoS for the application of enhanced mobile broadband and ultra-reliable low-latency massive IoT systems in network slices, according to Reed.

Another area that’s emerging in network customization and intelligence, according to Tripani, is self-organizing networks (SON), which can configure and optimize parameters to enhance various network operations and to automatically recover from failures.

“SON is an important step in the direction of network automation and network intelligence,” Tripani said. “It basically allows us to configure and optimize parameters to enhance several network operations automatically, instead of changing some RF parameters manually.”

Through RF optimization, if the network finds coverage holes or capacity problems, it will make changes to increase RF performance.

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