12:00
Registration & Networking over Lunch
13:00
Introduction to the Cambridge Wireless Radio Technology SIG by Gerald Miaille of CSR
13:10
Welcome from our partner, Stuart Revell of ICT KTN
13:15
Welcome from our host, Steve Crammond of PA Consulting
13:20
Welcome from our joint lunch sponsor, Jamie Lunn of Rohde & Schwarz UK
13:25
Quantifying the benefits of MIMO and millimetre waves: less is more; William Carson, Consultant Analyst, PA Consulting
The spectrum crunch has reignited interest in millimetre wave communications. Huge bandwidths are available at these wavelengths but at what cost? Academia and industry have been addressing potential stumbling blocks that degrade performance, for example, mobility, shadowing and range. This talk illustrates how multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies addresses these issues and could deliver the promised increased capacity benefits. Using information-theoretic models and metrics, we discuss how modern communications devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops) should exploit spatial diversity for millimetre wave communications.
13:45
Q&A
13:50
Towards Body-Centric Wireless Communications at Millimeter Wave Frequencies; Professor Yang Hao FIEEE, FIET, Queen Mary University of London
Body-Centric Wireless Communications is referred as to a new means of communications with the use of wearable and implantable wireless sensors connected through body-area networks. Potential applications include healthcare, defence, security, smart home and personal entertainment, just to a name a few. This talk gives an overview of recent development of this research, in particular, the feature of radio propagation of millimeter waves on the body, antenna and system design requirements and future applications at 60 and 94GHz frequencies.
14:10
Q&A
14:15
V-Band Radio Systems - Practical Deployment Considerations; Dr Tim Brown, Lecturer, 5G Research Centre, University of Surrey and Andy Sutton, Principal Network Architect, EE
EE has delivered Europe’s fastest LTE rollout and acquired over 2 million 4G customers in record time. This investment in network capability along with fast adoption from consumers and businesses alike highlight the importance of advanced digital mobile communications infrastructure to the UK economy. To ensure 4G maintains the wow factor it’s essential that the network can scale in terms of capacity density
within high traffic areas. The adoption of small cells and integration with the macro network to form HetNets, will ensure this objective can be realised. The use of point to point links at V-band is one of the solutions available to provide cost-optimised backhaul from the small cell layer. This presentation will detail the challenges from an operator perspective as well as the academic perspective in terms of implementation at this band, which will include device size constraints, path loss issues and will discuss some possible means of overcoming the difficulties.
14:50
Q&A
14:55
Refreshment Break and Networking
15:25
Exploiting the Spatial Sparsity of mmWave Outdoor Channels for Beamforming;Djamal Berraki, PhD Student, University of Bristol
The ever increasing demand for data access has pushed the carriers to deploy small cells. As providers attempt to offer higher capacity, they are faced by the shortage in the bandwidth used by the current systems. One prominent solution could be to migrate the carriers to higher, non-licensed or lightly licensed, frequency bands such as mmWave where bandwidths of the order of 100 times larger than those used by existing wireless access technologies are available.
This talk will present a study of the application of the Compressive Sensing (CS) theory to accurately estimate the sparse spatial mmWave propagation channel. This scheme is especially attractive for outdoor mmWave systems where large antenna arrays are more likely to implement beamforming to compensate for pathloss. Current analogue beamforming techniques such as the codebook based 802.11ad beamforming manifest large beamforming overhead for large antenna arrays of typically 16x16 elements. Measurements in an anechoic chamber are carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the CS concept. The impact of noise on the estimation of Directions-of-Departure using CS theory is analysed. Finally the benefit of exploiting the reconstructed Power Angle Profile in beamforming is assessed and compared to the beam searching algorithm adopted in the IEEE 802.11ad standard.
15:45
Q&A
15:50
Low Cost 60 GHz Backhaul: Opportunities and Challenges; Mark Barrett, CMO, Blu Wireless Technology
Worldwide License free operation in the 57 – 64 GHz band has spurred the development of a number of wireless systems targeted at consumer applications – most notably the 802.11ad extension of the WiFi standard marketed as WiGigTM. This is forecast to develop into a mass market measured in billions of devices per annum over the next 5 years. Meanwhile, MSOs are being driven to rollout dense LTE mobile networks to meet the exponentially increasing data demands of their smartphone customers – but without
increasing their monthly bills. This has created the acute need for low cost and flexible wireless backhaul in densely populated urban areas. The question asked is to what extent wireless backhaul can re-use technology developed for the WiGig mass market. This paper explores some of the fundamental radio and baseband technology challenges behind adapting 60 GHz WiGig technology for wireless back haul applications.
We also highlight the need for changes in the European and Asian radio regulatory frameworks to encourage the deployment of low cost 60 GHz mesh networks. Finally, we comment on how this technology base can be extended for future mobile 5G communications.
16:10
Q&A
16:15
Realising 5G Cellular in the mmWave Band; Howard Benn, Head of Standards & Industrial Affairs, Samsung Electronics Research Institute, UK
From GSM (2G) delivering data at 9.6 kbps, to LTE (4G) providing 10’s of megabits per second our expectations grow every year. What will 5G be, is it just higher data rates, and if so how can we deliver this in the sea of tiny spectrum allocations scattered from 700 MHz up to 3.6 GHz? Samsung have been thinking about this. We will show how cellular can deliver 1Gbps in the mmWave (20 – 40GHz) band, starting with the theory then moving to our demonstrator system working at 29 GHz.
16:35
Q&A
16:40
Open Forum, chaired by Stuart Revell of ICT KTN
17:15
Closing remarks from John Haine of u-blox AG and fill in evaluation forms
17:20
Event Closes