Mobile Broadband Technologies Research Articles

Wireless Mobile Communication : A Study of 4G Technology

Mobile communication is one of the hottest areas and it is developing extremely fast in present times with advanced techniques emerging in all the fields of mobile and wireless communications. The exponential growth of user demands, the limitations of the Third Generation of Mobile Communication Systems(3G) and the emergence of new mobile broadband technologies on the market have brought researchers to a throughout reflection on the Fourth Generation (4G).The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the different aspects of 4G which includes its features, its proposed architecture , key technological enabler, its benefits over existing wireless communication system, present key challenges and point to some proposed solutions.

CDMA2000 Past, Present and Future

The article looked into the possible future of 3GPP2s CDMA2000 1X and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO networks. The 3G CDMA2000 family of standards including EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) is in the daily use of more than 600 million customers across the globe. During the last few years the development efforts around CDMA2000 had been declined and its importance had been overshadowed by more advanced 3GPP LTE and IEEE WiMAX mobile broadband technologies. Due to these reasons, CDMA2000 operators are looking for alternative migration paths. The article investigated multiple facets for the future of CDMA2000 industry and these aspects were covered both from research and operational perspectives. The article first focused on the short term interoperability challenges to LTE and WiMAX and provided some antidotes for addressing these hurdles. The key challenges that were investigated include spectrum planning, authentication and security, end-to-end QoS (Quality of Service), voice enablement and data service continuity. The investigation revealed that a new QoS mapping mechanism between EV-DO and WiMAX similar to the one shown in the article is required for smooth operation. The analysis further indicated that CSFB (Circuit Switched Fallback) and SVLTE (Simultaneous Voice and LTE) were two techniques which could be used to support CS voice on an LTE/CDMA network; however they had different inter-radio access technology interworking requirements. In the following section performance aspects of both WiMAX and EV-DO were highlighted indicating a deep dip in throughput values once the users switches from WiMAX to EV-DO. The article concluded by discussing the future roadmap of CDMA2000 from 1X Advanced and DO Advanced perspectives. A performance comparison between 1X and 1X Advanced and EV-DO and DO Advanced was also presented.

The Transformation of Personal Communications and the Erosion of Traditional Voice Provider Dominance

The paper examines the evolution of personal communications and the implications for traditional switched voice services provided by incumbent local exchange carriers. As the nature of personal communications has evolved and become increasingly competitive, incumbent local exchange carrier dominance of communications through the provision of voice telephony has eroded, and therefore so has the primary rationale for regulating traditional voice telephony. The primary focus of this analysis is residential communications. In particular, mobile and packet-switched broadband technologies have accelerated the adoption of alternative voice access methods for residential consumers, including the adoption of wireless telephony, interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and competitive switched telephony as alternatives to switched voice telephony provided by incumbent local exchange carriers. In addition to access, mobile and broadband technologies have enabled a shift toward entirely new application-level modes of communication, such as text messaging, instant messaging, email, social networking, computer telephony, and Internet video conferencing. While these shifts in access-based and application-based alternatives have occurred incrementally over many years, the transformations — in the way consumers communicate with each other, plus the associated industry responses and changes industry structure—have been substantial. The analysis measures the magnitude of the consumer shift away from incumbent switched voice. It builds up incrementally a measurement of the shift away from incumbent switched voice, from a very conservative approach focused simply on access technologies to more comprehensive approaches taking into consideration application-level communications alternatives. The most conservative measure examines access choices for primary lines at the household level. It is possible to eliminate the primary line constraint and focus on total lines or connections. Extended to wireless, this is the most generous access-based approach, given multiple wireless connections per household. We next expand the measurement of alternatives to voice to include application-level communications modes. This more comprehensive approach takes into account the ways that technology continues to change the nature of personal communication. For example, there would appear to be greater emphases on time shifting, place shifting, device-shifting, format shifting, multi-party messaging, and integration with online applications and activities. After a discussion of measurement challenges, the analysis utilizes national data to map out the shift in demand for personal communications. In particular we map the extent of demand for communications at the application level by measuring the diffusion of broadband and mobile devices, networks, and applications compared with traditional voice access methods. Once we have developed reasonable measurements to capture the shift to alternative communications methods, we discuss opportunities for assessing wireline voice providers’ competitive responsiveness, taking into consideration the benefits and limitations of traditional measures.

Mobile broadband-based healthcare management: advantages, issues and challenges

Massive advancement of mobile computing technology and systems has led to their integration in different aspects of our life. Mobile and pervasive environments built over wireless infrastructures have introduced new possibilities in the healthcare sector in the form of real time health monitoring and diagnosis systems. While current third generation technologies may be sufficient to implement simple monitoring applications involving small amount of data using short messages, systems involving round-the-clock mobile health monitoring, remote tests and diagnosis and other real time applications in healthcare sector requires seamless fourth generation mobile broadband technologies like WiMAX or LTE. In this work, we discuss features, benefits, socio economic reasons of mobile health management and identify some of the most recent mobile health management systems developed and deployed worldwide. Finally, we present the architecture of a next generation healthcare system and discuss issues and challenges that should be addressed in this system.

The new digital divide: the confluence of broadband penetration, sustainable development, technology adoption and community participation

There have been significant efforts during the last years to define indicators to estimate the digital divide among nations, regions and social groups. The first attempts considered are mainly parameters of technical nature related with access to computers and Internet connectivity. Though these technical parameters gave an initial indication of the magnitude of the digital divide, they did not provide a complete picture of its dimension and context. In this paper, we propose that grass roots participation and integrating socioeconomic development with human values and taking advantage of the advent of emerging mobile wireless and efficient broadband technologies play a significant role in redefining the nature of the digital divide. The understanding of the new paradigm of broadband penetration, sustainable development, technology adoption and community participation is fundamental to develop national plans and agendas for digital inclusion, particularly in rural and underserved populations contexts.

From 3G to 4G: standards and the development of mobile broadband in China

This paper explores the way that increasing engagement in international standardisation processes has enabled Chinese firms to become global players in mobile telecommunications technologies and China to become a major influence in the international information and communications technology (ICT) standards arena. From a ‘social shaping of technology’ perspective it examines the development of the third generation (3G) TD-SCDMA (time division synchronous code division multiple access) mobile telephony standard (TD) and the path laid towards the next generation of mobile broadband standards and technologies. The paper highlights the complex interactions between a wide array of players involved, including national and foreign firms, and different sections and levels of the Chinese state. TD's success was by no means predetermined. China eventually adopted a pragmatic approach implementing TD and the two established Western standards. This complex history and interplay between Chinese and foreign players calls into question the idea of national or indigenous technologies for large-scale infrastructures, and highlights the limitations of national strategies in globalised innovation processes.

Towards privacy-enhanced mobile communities—Architecture, concepts and user trials

Abstract With the advent of mobile broadband technologies and capable mobile devices, social communities become a ubiquitous environment for people to stay in contact and share information with friends and fellows. This provides new opportunities for communities and their providers (e.g. regarding advertising) but also implies new question regarding the privacy and trust of their users. We argue that a balance needs to be found between these (partially) diverging interests and motivate, why a new approach to identity management and users privacy is necessary in this context. Based on requirements retrieved by real-life communities, we describe an architecture including privacy enhancing concepts and advanced privacy respecting advertising, which addresses such requirements. We further describe the architectures’ prototypical implementation, and present for the first time evaluation results based on user trials with two different mobile communities.

Security of MBAN based Health Records in Mobile Broadband Environment

Strong developments in mobile computing and web systems within the last decade have led to their integration in different aspects of our life. This has enabled us to explore new possibilities in the healthcare sector in the form of real time health monitoring and diagnosis systems. Mobile broadband technologies like WiMAX and LTE are being introduced at a rapid pace. This will lead to the development of healthcare systems involving round-the-clock mobile health monitoring, high volume data transmission for remote tests and diagnosis and other real time applications. There are several security issues that should be addressed to enable secured medical data transfer in a mobile broadband environment. In this work, we identify all such security issues and vulnerabilities involving transmission of medical data and propose a security scheme to address some of these issues.

3GPP LTE: The Future of Mobile Broadband

The mobile broadband technologies are reaching a commonality in the air interface and networking architecture; they are being converged to an IP-based network architecture with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based air interface technology. From technical perspective, fundamental goal of mobile broadband is to offer higher data rates with reduced latency. The third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) presents the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) project in order to accommodate increasing mobile data usage and new multimedia applications. In the near future, with the recent progress made by technical specifications and vendor technology demonstrations LTE will emerge as successor to cellular systems as a broadband wireless solution. This paper provides an overview of 3GPP LTE including its history, features, technology, architecture and future. The technology components include OFDMA air-interface, Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology and higher order modulation. The architecture includes Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) components. This paper will concentrate to describe the main functions of the most important network elements. Also, the aim of this paper is to present the future potential of LTE which will make it an inevitable choice for wireless network operators around the globe.

Unified simulation evaluation for mobile broadband technologies

System-level simulation has been widely used to evaluate system performance. Simulation methodologies have also been comprehensively discussed in different organizations or institutions. Most of the simulation methodologies proposed, however, mainly focus on one area of specific technologies. How to evaluate the performance of multiple air interface systems (e.g., cdma2000, WCDMA, WiMAX, and their evolutions) in a fair and comprehensive manner has not been addressed extensively. This article presents a unified simulation methodology, including fading channel models, system configurations, and how to consider technology-dependent algorithms such as scheduling, overhead modeling, interference margin definition, and resource allocation based on system loading. This article uses this framework to compare three major existing radio technologies: cdma2000 1x EV-DO Rev. A, WCDMA HSPA, and mobile WiMAX based on 802.16e. Key simulation results based on our suggested system models and settings are presented and analyzed. It is shown that under our unified framework, the two CDMA systems exhibit higher spectrum efficiency than mobile WiMAX, especially on the downlink, while mobile WiMAX provides a higher peak rate.

Leveraging advances in mobile broadband technology to improve environmental sustainability

Advances in mobile access broadband technology have a high potential to improve environmental sustainability both directly by enabling novel network deployment concepts and indirectly by changing the way people live and work. In this paper, improvements of the network topology enabled by ubiquitous broadband access are investigated. It is shown that a joint deployment of macro- and publicly accessible residential picocells can reduce the total energy consumption by up to 70% in urban areas. In addition the high potential of indirect effects of improving telecommunication networks, such as enabling teleworking and replacing business travel through video conferencing, is demonstrated and compared with the direct effects. Copyright 2008 Holger Claussen, Lester T. W. Ho, and Florian Pivit. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Leveraging advances in mobile broadband technology to improve environmental sustainability

Advances in mobile access broadband technology have a high potential to improve environmental sustainability both directly by enabling novel network deployment concepts and indirectly by changing the way people live and work. In this paper, improvements of the network topology enabled by ubiquitous broadband access are investigated. It is shown that a joint deployment of macro- and publicly accessible residential picocells can reduce the total energy consumption by up to 70% in urban areas. In addition the high potential of indirect effects of improving telecommunication networks, such as enabling teleworking and replacing business travel through video conferencing, is demonstrated and compared with the direct effects. Copyright 2008 Holger Claussen, Lester T. W. Ho, and Florian Pivit. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

A multiple‐perspective model for technology assessment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a multiple‐perspective model for technology assessment, apply it to mobile broadband technologies selection in China and give recommendations based on the assessment results.Design/methodology/approachA multiple‐perspective model for technology assessment using HDM is developed based on literature review and experts suggestions. Data are collected from a survey on China telecom experts.FindingsTD‐SCDMA got the highest score because of its potential political and social effects, and WCDMA and CDMA2000 following with close scores. While for WiMAX and 4G, Chinese experts showed relatively lack of confidence.Originality/valueThis paper presents a new multiple‐perspective model that can be generally applied to technology assessment problems at organizational level.

The role of WiBro: Filling the gaps in mobile broadband technologies

This paper analyzes WiBro, one of the emerging wireless technologies for portable Internet services (PIS), which are designed to enable mobile broadband access. Based on an empirical examination of consumer preferences for mobile broadband technologies and an estimation of the future demand for WiBro, this study proposes that WiBro should fill the gaps between competing mobile broadband technologies, such as 3G and WLAN.

Designing socially robust 4G wireless services

The difficulties and technical limitations of the third generation (3G) of wireless mobile communication systems as well as the emergence of new mobile broadband technologies on the market have prompted university and industry researchers to thoroughly reflect on the fourth generation (4G) of these technologies. In this article, we outline the interaction between technology and society that shall help to develop 4G in a way that maximize its acceptance and penetration in the market, while minimizing the downside risk of its failure. This presupposes that the user is considered as the cornerstone in the design of 4G. As a consequence, we sum up the relevant service design rules derived from such a user-centric model and propose innovative 4G services

Defining 4G technology from the user's perspective

The ever-increasing growth of user demand, the limitations of the third generation of wireless mobile communication systems, and the emergence of new mobile broadband technologies on the market have brought researchers and industries to a thorough reflection on the fourth generation. Many prophetic visions have appeared in the literature presenting 4G as the ultimate boundary of wireless mobile communication without any limit to its potential, but in practical terms not giving any design rules and thus any definition of it. In this article we give a pragmatic definition of 4G derived from a new user-centric methodology that considers the user as the "cornerstone" of the design. In this way, we devise fundamental user scenarios that implicitly reveal the key features of 4G, which are then expressed explicitly in a new framework - the "user-centric" system - that describes the various level of interdependency among them. This approach consequently contributes to the identification of the real technical step-up of 4G with respect to 3G. Finally, an example of a potential 4G application is also given in order to demonstrate the validity of the overall methodology