BY: WALKE

A Press Note by the European Commission dated August 18, 2009 says:
"Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest wireless technology, providing mobile Internet speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, ten times faster than 3G mobile networks. In Europe, it is currently being trialled by mobile operators in Finland, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK and is expected to be commercially available in Sweden and Norway in the first half of 2010. Between 2004 and 2007, the EU supported research on optimisation and standardisation of LTE (the WINNER I and II projects, run by a consortium of 41 leading European companies and universities) with € 25 million. This led to the development of the first concept for a LTE-based network infrastructure."

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ComNets contributed, substantially, to develop the 4G system known as LTE-Advanced in the European IST WINNER I / II and WINNER+ projects. There, ComNets was by far the largest university partner, and the sole university partner representing research of West Germany.

Main ComNets contributions that are now proposed to be part of LTE-A:

• Decode-and-Forward (layer 2) Relay for cellular systems to
  
  • boost cell capacity,
  • enlarge coverage range of a base station
  • serve shadowed areas, e.g. indoors and in city centers.
• Algorithm used by the World Radio Conference 2007 to calculate the spectrum amount to be allocated world-wide for 4G systems (ITU-R Rec. M.1036 Spectrum Estimation Methodology).
• openWNS, a public domain open source Wireless Network Simulator; the only non-proprietary system level simulator representing systems like WiFi, WiMAX, LTE-A¹ and IEEE 802.16m¹ .

^1 currently released to be used by friendly customers, only.

ComNets is participating in the ITU-R IMT-A Candidate Evaluation Group related to WINNER+ for evaluating LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m systems. ComNets is a tiny UMIC member. Its 4G research is not part of UMIC.