Ericsson (Greece)

Just before the commercial roll-out of European 5G networks, 5G trials in realistic environments have been recently initiated all around Europe, as part of the Phase 3 projects of 5GPPP H2020 program [1]. The goal is to showcase 5G's capabilities and to convince stakeholders about its value-adding business potential. The approach is to offer advanced 5G connectivity to real vertical industries and showcase how it enables them to overcome existing 4G network limitation and other long-standing issues. The 5G EVE H2020 5GPPP project [2] offers cutting-edge 5G end-to-end facilities (in 4 countries) to diversified vertical industry experimenters. The objective is to understand the needs of prominent industries across Europe and to offer tailor-made 5G experience to each and every one of them. This paper contributes to the understanding of vertical services' needs, by offering a thorough and concise vertical requirements analysis methodology, including an examination of the 4G limitations. It also provides real-life values for the targeted KPIs of 3 vertical sectors namely Smart Industry (4.0), Smart Cities / Health and Smart Energy, while assisting market roll-out by prioritizing their connectivity needs.

Recently, polling has been included as a resource sharing mechanism in the medium access control (MAC) protocol of several communication systems, such as the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network, primarily to support real-time traffic. Furthermore, to allow these communication systems to support multimedia traffic, the polling scheme often coexists with other MAC schemes such as random access. Motivated by these systems, we develop a model for a polling system with vacations, where the vacations represent the time periods in which the resource sharing mechanism used is a non-polling mode. The real-time traffic served by the polling mode in our study is telephony. We use an on-off Markov modulated fluid (MMF) model to characterize telephony sources. Our analytical study and a counterpart validating simulation study show the following. Since voice codec rates are much smaller than link transmission rates, the queueing delay that arises from waiting for a poll dominates the total delay experienced by a voice packet. To keep delays low, the number of telephone calls that can be admitted must be chosen carefully according to delay tolerance, loss tolerance, codec rates, protocol overheads and the amount of bandwidth allocated to the polling mode. The effect of statistical multiplexing gain obtained by exploiting the on-off characteristics of telephony traffic is more noticeable when the impact of polling overhead is small

Femtocells are destined to transform the way mobile operators build their cellular networks and grow their coverage and capacity. Femtocells are small base stations operating in the licensed cellular bands. They are so small and inexpensive, and transmit at such low power, that they are meant to be placed in individual homes and backhauled onto the operator's network via conventional digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable broadband access (or, when available, fiber).

This paper reports on a real-time radio-link at W-band (92–114 GHz). 10 Gbps peak rate is reached for a 2000 MHz carrier bandwidth, and 5.7 Gbps is demonstrated over a link-hop of 1.5 km for a 1500 MHz-carrier, running at 128 QAM and 32 QAM, respectively. High integrated radio front-end SIP modules using GaAs technology, achieves a linear TX channel power of +8 dBm, and RX NF of 8 dB from the radio. It is configured to achieve 5.7 Gbps in a radio link with 149 dB system gain.

This study proposes a new window function, namely Cosh-Hamming, for the nonrecursive digital filter design. The proposed window is obtained by the combination of two different windows in literature, known as Cosh and Hamming. First, the effect of adjustable independent parameter of proposed window on filtering characteristic in terms of minimum stopband attenuation and transition bandwidth parameters is examined for filter length N=51. Then, to evaluate the performance of the proposed window in filter application, a numerical comparison example with other well-known two parameter windows in literature is presented for filter length N = 127. The computer simulation results confirm that the proposed window can provide a better filter performance compared to Kaiser, Dolph-Chebyshev and Cosh windows because, for fixed filter length and transition bandwidth parameters, the filter designed by the proposed window can provide better minimum stopband attenuation.

Fixed mobile convergence is a topic that is receiving significant attention from the research community as well as telecom equipment vendors around the world. The paper surveys standardization activities and proposes an end-to-end architecture that will support this architecture. The role of traffic management IP-based quality of service is recognized as a vital component for the success of a multiservice, IP-based and converged network

The adoption of packet-switched technologies in mobile communication systems has enabled the provision of IP-based services to mobile users. Yet, these systems, such as the UMTS network, are unable to meet the stringent delay requirements imposed by the enhanced multimedia services due to the anchor point that introduce into the user's data path. Moreover, such applications will rely on IP-based control protocols for session and mobility management, resulting in duplication of functionality in the network at both the bearer and the application level. For the above reasons, the SAILOR network architecture is presented in this paper, proposing an evolution to the standard UMTS network, where GSNs are integrated into a single entity. Furthermore, the SIP protocol is adopted, for performing mobility and session management procedures currently undertaken by the UMTS non-access stratum protocols. Both modifications to the UMTS network and protocol architecture result in the smooth evolution of the UMTS core network towards IP as well as accomplish a significant performance gain.

Device‐to‐device (D2D) communication in a cellular spectrum increases the spectral and energy efficiency of local communication sessions, while also taking advantage of accessing licensed spectrum and higher transmit power levels than when using unlicensed bands. To realize the potential benefits of D2D communications, appropriate mode selection algorithms that select between the cellular and D2D communication modes must be designed. On the other hand, physical‐layer network coding (NWC) at a cellular base station—which can be used without D2D capability—can also improve the spectral efficiency of a cellular network that carries local traffic. In this paper, we ask whether cellular networks should support D2D communications, physical‐layer NWC, or both. To this end, we study the performance of mode selection algorithms that can be used in cellular networks that use physical‐layer NWC and support D2D communications. We find that the joint application of D2D communication and NWC scheme yields additional gains compared with a network that implements only one of these schemes, provided that the network implements proper mode selection and resource allocation algorithms. We propose 2 mode selection schemes that aim to achieve high signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio and spectral efficiency, respectively, and take into account the NWC and D2D capabilities of the network.

This chapter deals with the description of the various applied Mobile System Architectures, showing the evolution path towards the IP Convergence issue, with the introduction of the IP Multimedia Subsystem. It contains the most important networks entities of the different Mobile Networks Systems and their integration to the IMS. Being the core of the Fixed-Mobile Converge, IMS’ operation, functionality and interoperability with the other Telecom platforms are analyzed. Furthermore, aiming in a cost effective high QoS solution, typical performance evaluation strategies of the network manufacturers are described. Its scope is to give an overview of the existing architectures, their network components, their characteristics and their differences, while also show how nearly all traditional Telecom networks can be converged, with the use of the IMS, to an all-IP network, where various applications can be accessed by heterogeneous network platforms.

5G New Radio (NR) spectrum usage specification through the adoption of Time Division Duplexing (TDD) caters for flexibility in uplink and downlink bandwidth allocation, on the expense of interference and potential service degradation in cases of unsynchronised TDD operations among neighbouring networks. As the 5G NR in N78 has become the first major rollout of TDD cellular networks in Europe, the formalization of the appropriate approach to guarantee harmonization and unhindered TDD operations especially in cross-border areas between neighboring countries where the National Regulation Authorities (NRAs) recommendations do not have effect, becomes a key consideration for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). This paper presents the work carried-out as part of the 5G SEAGUL project by the MNOs COSMOTE and A1BG to analyze the implications incurred, by providing a subtle synopsis of the relevant best practices and proposing a stepwise approach for streamlining the necessary activities and negotiations among the MNOs. The paper contains the results of the subsequent real-life validation in the field, the Greece (GR)-Bulgaria (BG) borders including performance measurements.