ISSUE 05 2014
FUTURE NETWORKS
33
‘most wired country’, South Korea – nearly five times the global average of 14.8 per cent. On top of that, the world’s first LTE-Advanced network was launched in Korea in June 2013. Since then, all three of the country’s operators have launched LTE-Advanced services, which can accommodate significantly greater data traffic and speed than basic LTE. Now, we are looking to make LTE-Advanced even faster and more efficient. To keep up, operators around the globe need to focus on further evolving their current mobile network technologies to create a ‘future network’ that supports two things: higher data capacity and more intelligent data management.
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LTE-Advanced and beyond Finite and fragmented frequency resources have, in recent years, spurred mobile network operators to focus on developing LTE-Advanced – particularly its core technology, carrier aggregation – in order to better manage their radio frequencies. LTE-Advanced technology and its successors will therefore play a significant role in supporting higher network capacity.
SK Telecom has already begun using carrier aggregation in its networks and has seen major increases in capacity and efficiency of frequency use. We are now looking at actual speeds of up to 300Mbps in the very near future through tri- band carrier aggregation.
Besides carrier aggregation, additional standard LTE- Advanced technologies such as eICIC (enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination) and CoMP (Coordinated Multi- Point) are also considered important technologies in the enhancement of LTE-Advanced. We have already applied CoMP in April 2014 and plan to apply eICIC within the second half of this year.
he rise of LTE, coupled with the rapid spread of smartphones and streaming media, has brought dramatic changes to our daily lives. Smartphone penetration has reached 74 per cent in the world’s
Operators around the globe need to focus on further evolving their current mobile network technologies to create a ‘future network’ that supports two things: higher data capacity and more intelligent data management
Along with the technologies above, we also place great emphasis on the evolution of small cells. SK Telecom is currently focusing on developing what we called Super Cell, a future small cell network architecture that exploits small cell splitting and acquisition of new radio resources along with efficient utilisation of existing radio resources.
To make this a reality, SK Telecom has split small cell technology development into three stages. The definition of each stage is based on an operator’s frequency resources and level of small cell deployment. During the first stage, in which large-scale rollout of small cells has not yet taken place, an operator benefits most by combining macro cells and small cells that use the same frequency. This enhances efficiency in frequency reuse. At this stage, it becomes crucial to address the signal interference that occurs in a heterogeneous network environment when multiple cells of different sizes overlap within the same frequency. One technology developed to resolve this issue, Virtual One Cell, can alleviate performance degradation in cell edges by combining two cells to create one virtual cell. The solution maintains cell capacity through the use of Transmission Mode 9, a new transmission mode defined in LTE release 10.
The second stage begins when small cells are deployed at a moderate level. Here, signal interference ends up being a more serious problem than the efficiency of frequency reuse per unit of area. It becomes wiser, both in terms of network operation and capacity, to allocate a new frequency exclusively for small
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