Why ”one-size-fits-all” approach does not work in wireless systems anymore?

Type: Presentation
Authors: Marcin Dryjanski

Slide material presented during Keynote session at EAI Crowncom 2019 in Poznan, Poland, June 2019.

Abstract:

The history of wireless systems shows that the technology has developed to serve a particular purpose (e.g. 2G for Voice, 4G for IP connectivity). On the other hand, the services are evolving as well, and this requires additional features to the existing systems to realize the dedicated aspect. As with the advent of 5G it has become obvious that the services that the network will have to cope with different requirements, there are at least three possible ways to handle these requirements. First – we could get to a point where due to the fragmentation of the supporting technologies we would need to design separated systems to realize the requirements. Second, evolving the existing systems with “add-on” features to realize a particular function. Third, and the one discussed in this talk, is to provide a natively unified and hierarchical approach to the design of the system. To handle to the heterogeneity of: radio-access technologies (RATs), spectrum, devices, service mixes, features, we can create a framework being a hybrid mechanism, with the three main components: a unified upper-layer (independently handling the context from the underlying technology), an abstraction middle-layer (enabling an “easy” add-on of the below techniques), and a specialized lower-layer (to best serve a particular purpose). In this context, the “one-size fits all” is no longer true, as we should rather coordinate multiple features and technologies which are optimized for the specific requirements.

Outline:

• History of Wireless Systems
• LTE Complexity
• 5G Complexity
• Mobile Networks Design Approaches
• Unified and Hierarchical Framework
• Conclusions & Summary

Keywords: 3GPP evolution, 5G, Spectrum, Beyond 5G, Unified Networks, System Complexity, HetNet