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EU research project WINNER New radio technologies for improved mobile communications
In January 2004 a large EU research project started, which will make mobile communication systems more adaptable to user needs. Under the name WINNER, which stands for Wireless World Initiative New Radio, a consortium of 38 partners, co-ordinated by Siemens, are working towards enhancing the performance of mobile communication systems. The improvements of radio transmission to be explored by WINNER are crucial for enabling new mobile services and applications anytime and anywhere. A total of more than 80 person years per year will be dedicated to the WINNER project. The consortium includes manufacturers, network operators, academia, and research centres, mainly from Europe, but also from Asia and North America. Trend towards high speed data applications Future growth of mobile and wireless communications is expected mainly from data-oriented applications. User expectations are ever-increasing with regard to the variety of ubiquitous services and applications across a range of devices. There will be a corresponding change from predominantly circuit-switched to packet-based delivery to allow more efficient delivery of services and ‘always on’ without high cost. Many future services will require higher data rates and therefore higher bandwidth. For this reason more powerful radio access technologies will be needed. In addition, there is an ongoing paradigm shift driven by the user who expects ubiquitous communication providing higher performance at a suitable cost-benefit ratio without having to take care of the underlying technology. The ITU-R vision for systems beyond 3G The International Telecommunications Union-Radio (ITU-R) describes in its recommendation ITU-R M.1645 the ‘Framework and overall objectives of the future development of IMT-2000 and systems beyond IMT-2000’. This document from June 2003 is the basis for ITU-R’s future activities (see figure). Interworking platform and new radio On the one hand existing and evolving access systems will be integrated on a packet-based platform which will enable an easy interworking of a variety of such systems. This will enable the user to be “optimally connected anywhere, anytime”. On the other hand a radio access system for new mobile access and new nomadic/local area wireless access will have to offer a significantly improved performance compared to today's systems. ITU-R has set ambitious targets for peak user data rates which are:
WINNER goals The major goal and challenge for WINNER will be the implementation of the two aspects of the ITU-R vision explained above. One work item will therefore be the development of a unique radio concept. This radio concept will meet requirements ranging from wide-area systems to hot-spot and short-range scenarios, rather than developing specialised radio interfaces for each individual scenario. It will also consider requirements with respect to compatibility, power consumption, radiation, etc. The development of such a ubiquitous radio system will take advantage of leading edge research ongoing at partners being suppliers, operators, and academia. Another key issue for WINNER will be the definition of an architecture for future mobile, wireless communications which is able to integrate legacy and new systems. The WINNER participants are ready to exploit the results of the project based on the jointly developed vision and architecture. More information is available at www.ist-winner.org Please send us your comments on this article. |
