It’s Alive! The birth of the organic network

Last week Alcatel-Lucent’s (NYSE:ALU) research arm, Bell Labs, conducted a field test in Berlin of a technology it calls coordinated multipoint transmission, or CoMP, which connected a device to the network with transmissions from two separate towers. From a practical point of view, the technology is significant — it allows users to walk the boundaries between cells without seeing their signal quality degrade — while not earth-shattering. But from a network evolution standpoint, the implications of that test could be groundbreaking, signaling a transformation of the wireless network we haven’t seen since the introduction of digital communications.

CoMP uses network multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) technology, which differs from MIMO in that it transmits its plural beams not from a single radio source but from multiple radios. When a user gets to the edge of a cell where interference from neighboring cells causes the signal to fade and capacity levels to plummet, network MIMO causes the opposite to occur: Signals from neighboring cells reinforce the main transmission rather than interfere with it. The main benefit is a higher capacity on the cell edge, leading to a flattening out of the capacity peaks and valleys in a typical cellular topology. But inherent in network MIMO is something of far greater significance for future networks.

For the first times cells are collaborating with one another to deliver and receive their payloads to the device. Sure, base stations have always communicated and coordinated, managing handoff between devices and shrinking and expanding their cell radii to accommodate one another. But a base station’s cell has always been its own private domain — when a user enters it that cell is solely responsible for its communications needs. Network MIMO is the first instance in which cells are sharing one another’s burdens. In fact, the very notion of a cell as a delineator begins to blur as a single user can occupy six or seven cells simultaneously.

That multicell collaboration could lead to what researchers in the industry call “collaborative communications,” an architecture that allows a device to connect to any number of nodes on any number of networks, boosting not just the capacity of the cell edge, but the overall collective capacities of all networks involved. Prabakhar Chitrapu, principle engineer for InterDigital (NASDAQ:IDCC), envisions a network where devices themselves cease being endpoints on the network and become nodes that can relay data to other devices — a network where individual cells give way to capacity clusters, which collectively determine the optimal paths for data to wend its way through the network. In Chitrapu’s opinion, the cellular network will come to resemble the Internet — even become an extension of it.

“The wireless network today is the opposite of the Internet,” Chitrapu said in an interview for TelephonyOnline’s Wireless 2025 feature series. “It's highly centralized and hierarchical. It's a tree structure as opposed to a mesh structure. What collaborative communications does at the highest level of conceptualization is bring in an Internet-like topology or architecture to wireless networks.”

In Bell Labs’ conceptual view, the network no longer functions as a loose collection of cells, but as an ‘organism,’ in which each cell works together as a collective whole to serve millions of customers. The organism analogy might seem far-fetched, but researchers are taking it seriously. Beyond network MIMO and CoMP, Bell Labs is actually probing biology to extract new ideas for network design. Bell Labs is studying how spiders build perfect webs without having overall perspective of their creations or how the fetal cells of mice can grow limbs in perfect proportion, even though the cells in one leg are isolated from cells in the other legs. The idea is to build a network where cells not only work together but think together — a self-aware network in which each cell’s knowledge of its immediate surroundings could be used to collectively extrapolate the condition of the network as a whole.

E-mail me at kevin.fitchard@penton.com.