Small Cells in the Lamp posts

This lamp post does look a bit weird and ugly but it could be the future. 'SmartPoles', developed by Philips in conjunction with Ericsson delivers LED lights and LTE powered mobile broadband. According to the official press release:

With cellular data traffic expected to grow 9 times by 2020, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, and current telecoms infrastructure struggling to respond to this demand, Philips SmartPoles are enabling seamless mobile wireless 4G/LTE connectivity, with the small cell technology from Ericsson housed in the poles to enable increased data capacity in the telecoms network.  Philips SmartPoles were specifically designed and tested to accept FCC licensed wireless mobile network operator equipment. This enables an alternative deployment methodology for 4G LTE broadband services which will connect each pole through a fiber link to its core network.

Back in February TTP in partnership with IP.Access, Quortus and Freescale demoed another concept of small cell on the lamp post. The case study on Freescale's website says:

TTP’s new eNodeB based on the QorIQ Qonverge® BSC9131 addresses these challenges. It fits into a photocell socket of a standard lamp post, providing the quickest possible installation without any modification to the lighting column or its power supply. The solution incorporates LTE Access Point software from ip.access and has been demonstrated with the Quortus ECX Core evolved packet core. It is targeted at 50 metre cells, supporting up to 32 active users at downlink rates of up to 100 Mbps.

TTP have also made an interesting video on this:

This conceptual lamppost above was conceived as a part of Oakland Innovation Project in 2013. While its good, its not ambitious enough as it talks about just WiFi for connectivity.

On the other hand, V-Pole (Vancouver Pole) concept by Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland shows what may be possible in the distant future. It is a wireless data, electrical vehicle charging, neighbourhood bulletin board post that is also an LED lamp post that could eliminate some of that clutter. I think it will still take quite a few years before technology can make this possible. Press release from 2012 available here.

I look forward to the day when street lights and lamp posts can do more than simply provide lighting and be a hub for providing connectivity and much more.

Related posts:

• Small Cells on the Lamp posts and other street furniture
• Huawei's Lampsite

Dual-connectivity, Bearer split and other Release-12 small cell enhancements

3GPP TR 36.842 has some interesting details on the small cells enhancements for Release-12. There is too much details for me to go through at the moment but there is some discussions. One of them is on the Dual connectivity and another is Bearer split. The concept of Master eNB (MeNB) and Secondary eNB (SeNB) seems to have been introduced. Here are some interesting definitions:

Bearer Split: in dual connectivity, refers to the ability to split a bearer over multiple eNBs.

Dual Connectivity:Operation where a given UE consumes radio resources provided by at least two different network points (Master and Secondary eNBs) connected with non-ideal backhaul while in RRC_CONNECTED.

Master Cell Group: the group of the serving cells associated with the MeNB.

Master eNB: in dual connectivity, the eNB which terminates at least S1-MME and therefore act as mobility anchor towards the CN.

Secondary Cell Group: the group of the serving cells associated with the SeNB.

Secondary eNB: in dual connectivity, an eNB providing additional radio resources for the UE, which is not the Master eNB.

Xn: interface between MeNB and SeNB. Since the current E-UTRAN architecture was selected as baseline in this study, Xn in this TR means X2.

There is also the concept of RRC diversity which can help mobility. as per 36.842

RRC diversity is a potential solution for improving mobility robustness. With RRC diversity, the handover related RRC signalling could additionally be transmitted from or to a potential target cell as illustrated in Figure 7.1.3-1.  RLF could in this case be prevented as long as the UE is able to maintain a connection to at least one of the cells.  This will eventually lead to a more successful handover performance (i.e. avoiding UE RRC re-establishment procedure). The RRC diversity scheme could also be applied for handovers from the macro to pico cells, between macro or between pico cells.

Finally, the security aspects for this Bearer split and dual connectivity is also being discussed. See the latest Rel-12 security update here.

SUPER cell, by SK Telecom (SKT)

This looks very interesting and similar to some other concepts that I have discussed on 3G4G blog. One of them is the Multi-stream Aggregation (MSA) that allows aggregation of data from different radio access technologies. Another is the Phantom Cell concept, proposed by NTT Docomo, where control plane is handles by one cell and data by another. Small cells would generally do only data or larger cells would do control plane. Of course you can have different combinations as can be seen in the picture above.

This also reminds me of the earlier post about Super Macros. Is this SUPER cell a Phase 2 of the Super Macro kind of architecture? Or is it just a future 5G concept? Please feel free to add your comments.

Here is the embed of their complete presentation:

[Sk telecom] network evolutionand emerging services for future mobile broadband pt final from Netmanias