Connectivity Technology Blog

A recent paper, accepted in IEEE Network Magazine, explores the role of UAVs in facilitating core NFs with radio and backhaul capabilities. It analyses the required advancements in SBA, considering air traffic management, weather conditions and network connectivity and introduces new resource control and management functions to efficiently deal with topology and service assurance.
The use of UAVs for enhancing 5G network services is then evaluated and shown to be useful considering a range of V2X applications. The first part analyses the use of UAVs to enable network services across the RAN, core network and backhaul for supporting various vehicular-to-everything (V2X) applications considering a high mobility environment that brings challenges in service continuity, latency and reliability. Meanwhile, the experimentation analysis, presented in the second part, provides insightful results related to the use of UAVs as edge cloud, evaluating the potential of hosting an ACS function or …

Back in 2019, Nokia and Verizon hosted Operation Convergent Response (OCR 2019), a three-day live demonstration for first responders and public safety professionals.


In a simulated live-action crisis scenario, first responders re-enacted a recovery operation during a wildfire in a remote area, with no network available. That was until a small airplane carrying a Nokia LTE small cell solution appeared over the affected area, delivering critical communications to the firefighters on the ground below. You can watch the dramatic rescues in the video below.



More on Operation Convergent Response 2019 and Scenarios are available here.

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Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Meshing for BYOC (Bring Your Own Coverage)Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Drones, More Drones & DronewayTelecoms Infrastructure Blog: Flying Small Cells are here...The 3G4G Blog: An Introduction to Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN)Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Nokia's AirScale indoor Radio (ASiR) Small CellsConnect…

Paris Metro may not be the oldest in the world but it is still one of the world's oldest. Having first opened in 1900, it was last expanded in 2013. It it no doubt that this was the main motivation for the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens or RATP excitedly announced that 100% of Paris metro is now covered in 4G!

[Service] Le réseau est désormais 100% couvert en 4G ! Ce service permet notamment un accès facilité à l’information voyageurs en station, dans les tunnels et à bord des trains (applications #RATP et Via Navigo, comptes Twitter de l'entreprise ...) ➡️ https://t.co/pwYYHBPrz6pic.twitter.com/IZ1pcOfjzW — RATP Group (@RATPgroup) June 29, 2020
Mobile Europe reported:

The network was a joint effort between France’s four mobile operators – Bouygues Telecom, Free Mobile, SFR and Orange. 

The service works in the Metro's tunnels and on trains, according to Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), the authority that runs the city’s Metro and the Réseau Express …

You have read a lot about Loon on this blog and our sister blogs. The good news is that Loon is finally providing connectivity to Kenya. It's been nearly 3 years since they were first providing connectivity to flood affected Peru. In our last post on this topic on the blog, we looked at how Loon and Terrestrial LTE can co-exist, which is what is required for providing connectivity via Loon over rural areas.


A blog post by Loon CEO provided more details. Here are some extracts:

Balloons went from lasting hours to days to weeks to months to over half a year. Launching, once done by hand, is now done by twin, 90-foot tall automated machines that can send a balloon to 60,000 feet once every 30 minutes. Balloons that once floated freely around the world are now directed by machine-learning algorithms that have developed their own interesting and complex navigational maneuvers to achieve the mission of providing sustained service to users below. Communications equipment that could have …

Back in March this year, NTT Docomo announced that they are switching off their NB-IoT network due to not enough demand but will continue to support LTE-M and Cat 1.

Good spot.

An odd reason to give "in order to concentrate management resources". You wouldn't think it would take much resource. — Tom Rebbeck (@tomrebbeck) March 30, 2020
This news have started a lot of discussions, as you would expect, about the future of NB-IoT. From the standards point of view, IoT is going ahead full steam with both LTE-M and NB-IoT having been enhanced for 5G in Release-16 to support massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC). This slide from Qualcomm illustrates it well

A recent article from Mobile World Live had a heading, "China Mobile migrates IoT connections off 2G". While reading the article, you would get a feeling that China Mobile will stop supporting the 2G IoT (more like M2M) devices. But again this might not be that straightforward as I explain in this tweet.

Sh…

We have looked at Integrated Access and Backhaul, a.k.a. IAB in couple of posts earlier. The 3G4G Blog post late last year talked about what IAB is, what features will be available this year as part of Release-16 and what enhancements are planned as part of Release-17. We also looked at IAB from Ericsson Tech Review on the post here.
5G Americas released a whitepaper on Innovations in 5G Backhaul Technologies last month. There are quite a few interesting things in there that I am going to cover on this blog in this and the next few posts. There is a nice detailed explanation of IAB that complements my earlier posts very well. It should be a good starting point for anyone willing to look at IAB in detail.

One of the topic in the paper that caught my attention was IAB Resource Allocation Methodologies. If we think simplistically, then both the donor and the relay node can transmit simultaneously when transmitting in different frequencies (out-of-band). This can work really well when th…

This post provides a short introduction to what do we mean by Connected and Autonomous vehicles, which are often lumped together and referred to as CAVs.

In very simple terms, a connected car has its own mobile cellular modem that can connect to the mobile network and create a wireless local area network which allows the car to share internet access and data with other devices inside and in some cases outside the car.

Autonomous or self-driving cars on the other hand may not have connectivity available to them all the time. Regardless of the connectivity, they have to operate autonomously and depending on their surroundings, should reach their pre-programmed destination safely, along with any occupants. These vehicles use information from cameras, lidar and radar to create a 3D digital map of their surroundings and use this model to navigate.

While autonomous vehicles should operate smoothly and safely even when they have no connectivity to the network, it will definitely help if con…

Air-to-Ground communications have been talked for a while. I first covered it back in 2015 while writing about a trial between Deutsche Telekom (DT), Airbus and Alcatel-Lucent (now part of Nokia). In fact Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) was a pioneer in this area which can be seen from this old whitepaper here. In fact this paper is translated as it is in the new Nokia library here.

It wasn't at all surprising that yesterday, EE, part of BT Group, announced that it has signed an agreement with Nokia to build an industry-first nationwide 4G LTE Air-to-Ground network for the emergency services across Great Britain.


According to the press release:

The pioneering new 4G network will enable uninterrupted high speed broadband coverage for emergency service personnel working above ground from 500 feet up to 10,000 feet.

As part of the agreement, EE and Nokia will enable mission-critical network coverage for emergency services that will be the world’s first use case utilising commercial 4G LTE broadb…

I have covered Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on The 3G4G Blog here and looked at automated HetNet design which included FWA links here. I have also covered Wireline Wireless Convergence (WWC) as part of 5G and Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) posts. The links to the posts are available at the end.
Back in December, Juniper took part in a Light Reading webinar which is being shared as part of this post. With revenues flat and traffic continuing to explode, the unsustainable state of network economics needs another disruption. The 5G deployment cycle offers an insertion opportunity for new converged architectures. Wireless offload solutions can re-route the traffic of data-hogging mobile subscribers over wireline cores built for bandwidth and performance rather than mobile cores (EPC) primarily designed for mobility and portability.

The 5G Network Architecture in 3GPP Release-16 allows the convergence of fixed and wireless networks. This also allows many new opportunities as can be seen in…