Wireless 2025: A look at wireless in the year 2025

The second technique, spectrum reuse, will become the prime way of eking out higher capacities from the network, and that won't just mean the further splitting of cells. The cellular network will begin to shrink as bandwidth demands grows, said Håkan Eriksson, chief technology officer for Ericsson. The notion of the hulking cell site covering miles of urban terrain will evolve to one of smaller cells with centers spaced as closely as dozens of meters apart. A large city would be blanketed with hundreds of thousands of tiny cells — as opposed to hundreds of cells in the typical cellular deployment — each transmitting with the full capacity of a macro-cellular base station.

“Think of the macro-diversity encountered when simply driving down the street,” Eriksson said. “You would be passing through a new cell at every lamppost. There has to be tremendous mobility in such a solution.” The typical mobility management scenario of a single user occupying a single cell goes out the window, Eriksson said. A device would be in simultaneous contact with multiple cells, and the network would have to anticipate handoffs four or five cells down the chain.

The shrinking of the network already has begun occur with the introduction of the femtocell, which provides the equivalent of a personal site for an individual, business or family. But femtocells today are being used to fill in dead spots or offload traffic from the macro-network in a particularly high-use area. They haven't been used to fundamentally change the architecture of networks. According to Michael Oommen, vice president of device and technology development for Sprint, femtocells will play a big part in future networks, but it would be a mistake to think of it in terms of just big and small cells. The networks of the future will require radically different topologies, Oommen said, many of which wouldn't necessarily separate the notion of device from the notion of infrastructure. The devices themselves would become nodes in larger network topologies, communicating with one another along with multiple networks.

“The network is able to align itself to the needs of a customer respective to the device the customer has,” Oommen said. “I would say instead of a single network, you will have a hierarchical system of mini-networks. I wouldn't call it macro, micro or even femto. Your device itself wouldn't just be peer-to-peer, but peer-to-many or many-to-many. Your device should be able to sense the other devices around it. One device may be using another device's capability to communicate or to do certain processing. I wouldn't call that a femto network or a macro-network. I'd say the network itself becomes virtual.”

Even though wireless networks enable mobility, their architectures are fairly rigid: A device negotiates a series of predefined cells, connecting to a single tower at a time. The spectral bands it traverses and the air interface it uses all are predetermined, as is the set path its traffic takes over the network. The networks of the future, however, are being conceived as much more flexible, distributed and self-configuring architectures.

Vendor research labs are exploring radios that could be configurable in real time to any spectral band, even any radio access standard. Cognitive radio could be used to ferret out unused spectrum in the white spaces between TV channels or in unlicensed bands to add capacity to the network. In the case of software-defined radio (SDR), the device becomes a chameleon, adapting to whichever radio standard and frequency would be optimal at any given time or place.

“All you have is one bootstrapping protocol that allows a device to talk to the network,” said Vanu Bose, CEO and founder of Vanu, a pioneer in SDR base stations. “One guy says, ‘I want to make a videoconference call.’ Another guys says, ‘I want to Web surf, but I have limited battery life.’ Another guy just wants to make a voice call. The infrastructure can just look at all of these requests, look at what spectrum is available, look at what the interference situation is. Then it would optimally decide on the fly what communications standards each of those users should be using in terms of coding, modulation, even packet protocol, to best optimize for their needs and globally optimize for the best spectrum usage.”

Researchers aren't just re-evaluating the link between device and base station, though, they're readdressing the basic structure of the network. Instead of seeing the device as the end point in a one-to-one link with a base station, a device might be able to simultaneously link to multiple cell sites; it could link to multiple networks; and it could even link to other devices, which could act as relays between cell sites, said Prabakhar Chitrapu, principal engineer for Interdigital Communications.

“The networks of today, you can think about them as bundles of individual links,” Chitrapu said. But even in a simple scenario in which you have one device in two cell sites, by allowing the device to simultaneously connect to both base stations, the capacity available to the device increases — as does the overall capacity available in the network, Chitrapu said. “By treating these two links as a single network, your collective network capacity will be greater than two times the individual link capacity,” he added. “You're really going from a one-dimensional line to a two-dimensional plane.”

This kind of collaborative communications, taken to its ultimate extent, could evolve into a network architecture where there was no distinction between device and infrastructure; every transmitter could be an end point for its own data, as well as relay for someone else's. The infrastructure and the devices within such a “capacity region” would work collectively to decide the optimal path for each device's transaction and may even send data over multiple paths. If this sounds a lot like the structure of the Internet, it's no coincidence, Chitrapu said.

“The wireless network today is the opposite of the Internet,” Chitrapu said. “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. It's even conceivable that you can take several of the existing Internet protocols and apply them to the collaborative wireless network.”

To put it another way, not only will future wireless services meld with the structure of the Internet, but the physical infrastructure may become an extension of the Internet, too.

THE NEXT STEP

AT&T isn't the first operator to embrace new technologies. It was the last of the big U.S. carriers to deploy a 3G network. It's biding its time on LTE while competitors Sprint and Verizon Wireless forge ahead with 4G. But of all of the major operators, AT&T has done the most to articulate a hyper-connected vision of the future, encompassing all of its telecom assets. Called “Three Screens,” the initiative seeks to connect the television, the PC and the mobile phone under a single umbrella to a vast portfolio of network services that seamlessly glide from one platform to the next.

Though AT&T's portfolio of video, Internet and mobile services functions largely independently of one another today, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, said it won't be long before we start seeing the first critical linkages between devices in the home and the office, starting with the “slinging” of content from mobile devices to TV and PC screens. Looking past the horizon, closer to 2025, de la Vega expects that connectivity to expand beyond those three core applications, creating a world where anything conceivable can be interconnected — a network that blankets AT&T's customers with useful, timely and pertinent information. The hub of that personal network, de la Vega said, will be the mobile phone fed by a broadband connection.

“Wireless, and in particular mobile broadband, is going to change the way the world lives and the world works,” de la Vega said. “Mobile broadband, with the capability it has to connect people and machines, is going to dramatically change the way we conduct commerce. Our daily rituals are going to be significantly different and hopefully change for the better. Businesses will be more efficient, and people will be more effective. I really think this is going to be huge for the world.”

But de la Vega also warned that there would be obstacles to achieving such a vision. The two biggest, he predicts, will be the growing fragmentation of the mobile industry and the growing complexity of technology. De la Vega said he's increasingly worried by the growing number of mobile operating systems (OSes) sprouting up in the market, each with its own developer programs and stable of applications. The iPhone OS, which has been an enormous success for AT&T, exemplifies the problem. It has spawned an enormous number of apps hitherto unimagined in the wireless space, but most of them work solely on one platform, the iPhone OS. De la Vega cautioned that islands of innovation are developing in an industry that is supposed to be broadening its scope, not limiting it.

The second obstacle, the complexity of technology, always has plagued any industry invested in electronics — think programming your VCR and figuring out the self-cleaning oven — but those problems will only increase. In a hyper-connected world, users will not only have to make sense of increasingly complex devices, but also of the connections between them, de la Vega said. He cited the example of AT&T's sling content-transfer technology, which once launched will require no other input from a customer except a flick of the wrist in the general direction of the TV.

“You don't have to access a drop-down menu, go to Option 3 and make sure your TV is on Channel 2 — it just works,” de la Vega said. “The reason why it works is that these machines are smart enough and they're connected enough to discover each other, exchange the right protocols, making the process transparent to the user. That's the game-changer. If technology can make your life easier, instead of more complex, then we've hit a home run.

READERS' 2 CENTS, in reference to McGuire's description of an interconnected future:

TIM: Sounds good, but let me give you an example of how this will REALLY be used. :) I see a hot chick in line at Starbucks, so I take a picture of her on my phone and send it to the Facial Recognition App. … Now that we know her name, we can look her up on Facebook or Linkedin or whatever and see if she has a boyfriend. At this point we could use this opportunity to find interests we have in common and try to strike up a conversation with her. However, being the social chickens we are, we will instead play an elaborate social ritual game where we try to do things to get her to notice us. Like we might go buy that Hegel book she gave a favorable review for at Amazon, then pretend to read it while we stalk her over the next few weeks. We'll of course check her MySpace page frequently to see if she mentions a cool guy at Starbucks that is reading the Hegel book she just read. … Ultimately, nothing will happen because we've never bothered to actually connect with her in any meaningful way (that'd take balls) and we'll try to find some other person with whom we can make a connection without ever really having to connect.

Comment on Tim's 2 cents at the Unfiltered blog or e-mail kevin.fitchard@penton.com

READERS' 2 CENTS

Christopher Glenn: In 2025, I expect to get a SMS from my refrigerator that directly creates a to-do list item on my PDA with a deadline set to 12 hours later whenever my refrigerator's odor sensor recognizes that the milk is going bad. I also expect the refrigerator to automatically order new lightbulbs for itself when they go out … and while I am at it, I wouldn't mind if it had sensors in the 12-ounce can holder, too, that would automatically order more Cherry Diet Coke. Now if Peoria only had grocery delivery … but it will by 2025!

READERS' 2 CENTS, in reference to McGuire's description of an interconnected future:

David@BTR: I wonder if Mr. McGuire envisions a near-term scenario where we expand the concept of mobile roaming — where applications follow us, not just the ability to gain basic access when away from the network we subscribe to at home.

READERS' 2 CENTS, in response to de la Vega:

Vanaja: It sounds dynamic and very high expectation what Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive officer of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, described as a future scenario where the mobile device — which can no longer be accurately described as a phone — acts as the central hub for the connected home. Please remember that, as securities of networks are growing, but there are still big issues that need to be addressed and really tightened completely for this type of great future scenario which sounds fantastic in theory, but my concern is that we might be giving more options for intellectual hackers to gather more data for their crime.

Comment on the story at the Unfiltered blog or e-mail kevin.fitchard@penton.com

For more of Telephony's interactive feature, visit telephonyonline.com/wireless/future_of_mobile/