WINNER - WIRELESS WORLD INITIATIVE NEW RADIO

The mobile, wireless market is booming:
Mobile and wireless communication has seen a tremendous growth in the last years. According to the ITU, the number of mobile subscribers worldwide has increased from 215 million in 1997 to more than 1000 million today. It is predicted that by the year 2010 there will be more than 1700 million terrestrial mobile subscribers worldwide. The number of portable handsets has already exceeded the number of fixed line telephones. This growth has, up to now, been dominated by voice-oriented services. Future growth of mobile and wireless communications is expected mainly from data-oriented services and applications. User expectations are continuously 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 in order to provide suitable user satisfaction. For this reason, new and more efficient 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.

International co-operation towards cost efficient solutions:
In the international domain ITU-R approved the Recommendation ITU-R M.1645 "Framework and overall objectives of the future development of IMT-2000 and systems beyond IMT-2000“ in June 2003 as a basis of the future activities. This recommendation is also important in the preparation for the forthcoming World Radiocommunication Conference WRC-2007. The ITU-R vision for systems beyond 3G is illustrated by below figure.

The ITU-R vision for systems beyond 3G comprises two major paths:

On one hand existing and evolving access systems will be integrated on a packet-based platform to enable cooperation and interworking of these systems in the sense "optimally connected anywhere, anytime".

On the other hand the radio access system for new mobile access and new nomadic/local area wireless access will be developed to provide access with significantly improved performance compared to today's systems. The focus of the WINNER project is the development of this radio access system by taking into account the interworking with other systems.

The envisioned capabilities of the new components of future mobile and wireless communication systems were agreed with the following peak aggregate user data rates:

• up to approximately 100 Mbps for the new mobile access and
• up to approximately 1 Gbps for new nomadic / local area wireless access.

The below illustration of capabilities of IMT-2000 and systems beyond IMT-2000 is taken from ITU-R Recommendation M.1645 "Framework and overall objectives of the future development of IMT-2000 and systems beyond IMT-2000“, ITU-R Radio Assembly, June 2 – 6, 2003, Geneva.

The WINNER objectives:

The main objectives of WINNER are to:

• identify and analyse challenging user and usage scenarios to derive requirements for the WINNER radio interface
• define radio interface technologies needed for a ubiquitous radio system concept
• define radio network topologies and deployment concepts for the provision of a ubiquitous coverage area
• define radio level co-operation mechanisms between different Radio Access Networks (RANs)
• define a single ubiquitous radio access system concept, scalable and adaptable to different short range and wide area scenarios
• investigate the propagation conditions and to develop related radio channel models
• develop methods for efficient and flexible spectrum use and spectrum sharing
• contribute to the development of spectrum demand estimation methods in preparation for the World Radio Communication Conference (WRC) 2007

Co-operation with other trade regions:
Related research activities on systems beyond 3G have already started in regions outside of Europe. Especially in East Asia (China, Korea and Japan) activities have been ongoing for about two years. Internationally, the Wireless World Research Forum – WWRF has initiated research activities on systems beyond 3G towards global harmonisation.

 

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