Alcatel lucent betting up IP networking and LTE

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) is planning to sell its enterprise segment consisting of switches and communication gear. This is the second time in the span of three years that the company is trying to sell its enterprise unit. In 2011, the company tried to sell its enterprise unit but succeeded in selling call center unit, Genesys, for $1.5 billion. The reason the company wasn't able to sell its enterprise unit was the heavy cost requirement to restructure the unit, as it involves the labor union and associated pension obligations. Apart from pension obligations, the company's service offerings under the enterprise unit are outdated. Alcatel-Lucent's competitors, such as RingCentral and 8x8, provide an upgraded version of cloud based phone services. The company is planning to divest around $1.36 billion worth of assets and dispose non-core assets in order to increase its investment in IP networking. It plans to increase its investment in IP networking and ultra-broadband services to 85% of its total R&D investment by 2015. By 2017 data traffic on metropolitan access and aggregation networks may increase to 75% from the current 57%. The growth in data traffic provides Alcatel-Lucent with a great opportunity. Alcatel-Lucent recently entered into a partnershipwith Qualcomm (QCOM) to develop small cells for ultra-broadband wireless access.

In the third quarter, revenue from IP routing, terrestrial optics, and ultra-broadband access solutions increased 7% to $777.95 million. I expect the revenue from IP networking and ultra-broadband will increase in 2014 due to growing data traffic.

Expanding 4G network

Alcatel-Lucent is also looking to expand its reach in the 4G LTE network. The company signed a deal with YooMee in November to deploy an end-to-end TDD LTE solution including wireless backhaul and evolved packet 

source: seelinglfa.com

Handover and power control in UMTS network

The rapid growth  of mobile and internet users has led towards the development of the third generation of mobile communication systems. The UMTS is a family of 3G mobile networks designed to offer high bandwidth radio access.

Enhanced UMTS is a Umts evolution step, which makes possible an effective high data rate end to end packet based transmission . IST-SEACORN has proposed a set of enhancements to UMTS which include among others advanced modulation and radio transmission techniques improved strategies for IP routing and QOS assurance.

HANDOVER

The handver process is one of the essential means that guarantees user mobility in a mobile communication  network. The concept of mobility is simple.

When a subscriber moves from the coverage area of one cell to another , a new connection with the target cell is set up and the connection of the previous cell is released.

A basic handover process consists of three main phases:

a)     Measurement phase dealing with the mechanics of measuring important parameters.

b)    Decision phase algorithm parameters and handover criteria

c)     Execution dealing with radio resource allocation and handover signaling.

1.     Operating environment

A handoff algorithm needs to be designed with the operating radio environment in mind in order to define the correct parameters needed in the decision phase. Operating environments are usually separated as:

•        Indoor: low speeds and well-defined mobility paths

•        Outdoor: variable speeds and mobility paths that depend on each environment separately.

A further classification of environments can be made according to their cell size:

•        Pico-cellular and micro-cellular environments: characterized by small cells and low transmit powers. In pico-cellular both users and base stations are located indoors, whereas in micro-cellular only outdoor users are considered. The antenna height in a microcellular environment is typically at lamppost level (5m above ground).

•        Macro-cellular environments have large cells (several kilometres) and transmit high output power with the antenna mounted on a high tower above all surrounding rooftops (15m+ above ground).

POWER CONTROL

Power Control has a dual operation. Firstly, it keeps interference at minimum levels by controlling the power transmitted, achieving further to minimize the power consumption at the mobile user (called User Equipment (UE) in UMTS) and the base stations (called Node Bs in UMTS). Secondly, it ensures an adequate quality of service (QoS) level so that the percentage of dropped calls is kept below the acceptable thresholds.

Power Control is important both in the uplink and the downlink directions. In the uplink direction control is required in the situations where UEs are located very close to the Node Bs and are transmitting with excessive power. This is called the near-far effect and can result in blocking the whole cell, with UEs that are close to the cell edge possibly overlooked. If the uplink power is too high interference in neighbouring cells (inter-cell interference) may also be a direct result of the near-far effect. In the downlink direction, Power Control directly affects system capacity. System capacity is determined by the total downlink transmission power for each cell i.e. when total downlink transmission power is minimized then the Node B can accept more UEs and the capacity is increased.