The Future 4G Mobile Networks

Objectives

Two international standardization organizations, the Third Generation Project Partnership (3GPP) and IEEE 802.16 Working Group (WG) are actively developing new mobile communication standards for achieving the performance goals of IMT-Advanced mobile systems.

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) and IEEE802.16m consider a series of new transmission technologies, such as, coordinated multipoint transmission and reception, relay and carrier aggregation.

The objective is to meet the high technical and services requirements of IMT-Advanced standards, such as, peak data rate up to 100Mbps in high speed mobility environment and 1 Gbps in a pedestrian environment. The bandwidth varies from 20MHz to 100MHz.

Techniques

Multi-antenna transmission techniques can effectively improve both downlink and uplink transmission performance. In LTE up to four antennas can be deployed on a Base Station (BS) or on a Mobile Station (MS).

In practice, multi-antenna techniques cannot continuously increase transmission bit rates, because the constraints on terminal size, complexity and cost limits the number of antennas that can be installed on a LTE unit. In order to achieve IMT-Advanced performance requirements, carrier aggregation has been proposed to aggregate two or more component carriers for supporting high data rate transmission over a wide bandwidth (up to 100MHz) for a single terminal.

LTE addresses the emerging trend for the mass provision of rich multimedia services, such as Mobile TV, in a more power and spectral efficient way than its predecessors. The Evolved - Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (E-MBMS) framework is envisaged to play an essential role for the LTE-A proliferation in mobile environments.

The Workshop

This Workshop will focus on the inter-disciplinary research challenges associated with several aspects of the next generation of mobile networks. This one-day workshop aims to bring together industrial, operator and regulator perspectives and highlight both key technologies and solutions behind the future 4G mobile systems.