Dense Network Architecture – Why is it Important Now and Why Should You Care?

Dense Network Architecture – Why is it Important Now and Why Should You Care?

For the last 15 years iBwave has supported the majority of the carriers in the world through millions of in-building network deployments as they focused on a smooth and secure transition to the next generation of technology e.g. 3G to 4G. For the next 15 years we plan to accompany our carrier and enterprise customers on the same successful path where DNA (Dense Network Architecture) will play a central role.

DNA is the Path to 5G

With the completion of the first 5G new radio 3GPP standard, the wireless industry is in the final dash towards commercialization of 5G technology potentially by 2019. Major wireless carriers are actively conducting trials to prepare for the fast approaching commercialization phase of 5G. As an integral part of the wireless eco-system, iBwave is working closely with its partners to ensure that they are well-prepared for this final step. We have a clear vision today that networks are becoming denser, this is true from a couple of different perspectives. First, we see the fixed architecture is evolving towards richer fiber-based networks for both backhaul and fronthaul. Second, we see that there is a densification of Radio APS from 3G to 4G and also in Wi-Fi with the number of global Wi-Fi hotspots growing exponentially, and forecasted to grow by 454 million by 2020 (Statista). Also, a total of 2.3 million Small Cells were being shipped last year (Source: RCR).

Don’t Forget the 3 80s

Industry trends and numbers shows that data traffic is increasing at a rate of 80% per year, we also know that 80% data traffic originates in-building and that 80% enterprises are ready to switch providers if they get better indoor coverage in an effort to improve customer experience. We can call this the 3-80’s rule and if you look at it you should start thinking of your Dense Network Architecture (DNA), from an in-building standpoint. It is important to take this approach because this is where most of your traffic is happening and this is where most of the enterprises will focus their energies to improve quality of customer experience. Today however we are not seeing this mindset as a majority of the early 5G trials are happening outdoors.

Ensure Your In-Building Networks Are 5G Ready

To address the above, at iBwave we think that 5G trials need to be conducted indoors alongside the existing outdoor trials, to highlight potential deployment issues for your Dense Network Architecture (DNA). Potential issues such as the current structured cabling and whether it supports DNA, or not? We have to move into a fiber-rich architecture inside the building, we need to figure out whether passive optical LAN is going to replace the typical CAT 5 or CAT 6 structure cabling? The 3 80’s rule should make us focus much more on in-building because that’s where the traffic is. This will help us pin point potential issues which might be very critical, for example whether the current cabling CAT 5 and CAT 6 is able to handle 5G or whether this next gen technology requires fiber rich networks inside the building.

Ask the Insiders

iBwave is happy to help our Carrier and Enterprises customers navigate the world of DNA and 5G networks by helping them prepare in advance and choose the best options. If you are an enterprise and you are curious about hearing what DNA and 5G will mean for you then come talk to us.

Send us your comments below or ask us a question here

A New Release of iBwave Design is Here

What’s iBwave Release 10 About?

The newest release of iBwave Design 10 provides teams with everything they need in a software to design for new and emerging wireless technologies and tackle the challenge of designing for dense environments.

Teams can now use iBwave Design to really leverage new technologies like LTE-Advanced, LAA, and CBRS to optimize the data throughput rates of the network and provide network subscribers with the seamless mobile experience they expect from carriers.

What are the new features?

The key new features for iBwave Design Release 10 are:

Body Loss Modeling
LTE LAA with Carrier Aggregation
LTE Best Server Map RSRP, RSRQHandOff Matrix
Hand Off Matrix
Frequency Reuse Architecture

Body Loss Modeling:

This feature allows you to consider the impact of body loss on prediction for high-density venues such as stadiums, convention centers, shopping malls, etc. Especially useful in stadium designs where it is crucial to consider body loss to get prediction accuracy.

Body loss modeling enables a higher degree of design accuracy in terms of SNIR calculation and also helps you and your team generate an optimal bill of materials for new DAS antennas to support increased data throughput.

LTE LAA with Carrier Aggregation

Leverage the unlicensed 5GHz spectrum as a secondary carrier to boost the speed of your LTE in-building network and achieve true LTE Advanced with downlink speed up to 1 Gbps.

This also enables you to leverage LAA to improve network capacity by off-loading cellular data traffic on unlicensed spectrum while saving on licensed spectrum cost.

A design combining LAA with carrier aggregation allows carriers to off-load part of their data traffic on this unlicensed spectrum to offer a better data connection while saving on spectrum cost.

LTE Best Server RSRP, RSRQ

With this new feature you can quickly troubleshoot interfering sectors and easily optimize for higher data throughput rates by probing with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th best server.

Network densification often implies an increase in the number of sectors to provide higher capacity in different zones. However, by doing so, it could generate new unwanted interferences between sectors, in turn negatively impacting the overall quality of data connectivity. LTE Nth Best Server RSRP, RSRQ allows to quickly pinpoint interfering sectors so that the design can be easily optimized for higher throughput.

Hand Off Matrix

The hand off matrix is a new output map to quickly spot handoff overlap between sectors. With this new feature, you can now further optimize sector configuration with correct handoffs while saving cost on equipment deployments.

I really like the updated that have been made regarding LTE-LAA and Best Server/Handoff Matrix. This will allow troubleshooting a design to become faster.
– RF Engineer, Large System Integrator

Frequency Re-Use Architecture

This new feature allows you to re-use multiple channels with LTE bands to fully leverage all the available LTE licensed spectrums while reducing interference between adjacent sectors to increase overall user data throughout.

Interested in Learning More about Emerging Technologies & Network Convergence?

The entire industry is gearing up for 5G with high market expectations to enable new and fascinating use cases like VR/AR, driverless cars, massive IoT living, smart buildings and more

Read our eBook by industry thought-leader and futurist Dean Bubley to learn more about what convergence is and what is driving the integration of cellular, Wi-Fi and Fiber infrastructures.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

Network Densification – Stadium Use Case

It’s all about more and faster mobile data!

For the past decade, a mobile carrier’s prime focus has been on cellular coverage improvements to provide traditional mobile services to their subscribers – i.e., voice, SMS, and data services – anywhere, anytime. As 80% of mobile sessions happen indoors, there has been a major push for massive deployments of active/passive DAS systems inside major venues like airports, stadiums, enterprise campuses and hospitality venues since the early 2010s.

However, with the growing success of media-rich apps like WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook messenger or WeChat, Line in Asia (the list goes on and on), mobile communications are now primarily driven by mobile data consumption with bandwidth hungry applications for HD video calling, streaming and sharing.

With this insatiable demand for more data usage driven by the commercial success of unlimited data plans, mobile carriers are now engaged in a competitive race to give their mobile customers faster and faster data speeds. Carriers are convinced that eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband) services are business critical for their future success. As a result, they are not waiting for 5G readiness to enhance their network performance in large venues; they are addressing it now with today’s available technologies. They want to be prepared to provide superior broadband quality experience for their mobile subscribers.

Design for mobile broadband brings new complexities

As reported by our customers, more than 50% of their venue projects are related to network upgrades for more broadband data capacity. The so-called network densification allows support for more data connections with much higher data throughput to get near to the Gigabit per second from the traditional 50 Mbps downlink speed with 4G.

To achieve this goal for Gigabit LTE speed serving large scale of mobile connections, a new approach for in-building design is required. It relies on a subtle combination of RF design optimization – i.e., do more with existing spectral resources, use of unlicensed spectrum with LTE LAA, technology evolution with carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO modeling and cell densification with small cell deployments. It makes the in-building design more complex with the additional challenge to frequently upgrade for more capacity so that the carrier keeps up with the fast pace of more user data consumption.

That’s why iBwave strives to provide new in-building feature-rich capabilities for network densification, to help our customers to make the DNA (Densified Network Architecture) upgrade fast, reliable, and easy.

Stadium Use Case: Sharing the fan experience with mobile.

Let’s look at a specific use case for network densification for sports stadiums, and the benefits of our new advanced capabilities available with the latest Release 10 of iBwave Design.

The graph below shows the impressive cellular data growth consumed by football fans during the Super Bowl event, doubling year-over-year while Wi-Fi consumption only shows one-digit annual growth. On average, last February 2018, a Super Bowl fan consumed a half gigabyte of data – or the equivalent 10-15 minutes of HD video sessions.

Graphic: Cellular data consumption by Football fans attending Super Bowl
Data Source: Mobile Sports report 2018

The challenge for large US carriers is to keep up the performance of their DAS with the demands of their data-hungry consumers. Furthermore, spectrum resources are becoming scarce making it even more challenging for network densification. For example, since 2008, FCC has only released 295 MHz of spectrum for US operators.

Finally, with this exponential growth of data traffic, mobile carriers must carry out more frequent design changes for more densified network upgrades.

To solve these key challenges for stadiums, iBwave Design now provides a set of powerful tools that allow:

Faster data throughput with stadium design leveraging 5GHz unlicensed LAA
RF resource optimization with LTE frequency re-use
Better prediction accuracy for stadiums with body loss modeling
Easier troubleshooting reducing signal interference between different sources
Increased productivity with up-to-date digitalized stadium project documentation

Let’s have a closer look at some new capabilities that can greatly support more network densification for a stadium:

Body loss modeling:

With the new trend of under-seat DAS antenna deployment in highly dense stadiums, it is crucial to consider body loss into the design prediction. Our new body loss modeling feature allows for more design accuracy in terms of SNIR calculation. It also helps to generate a more optimal bill of materials for new DAS antennas to support increased data throughput.

LTE LAA with Carrier Aggregation

LTE LAA – Licensed Assisted Access leverages the 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum to provide additional LTE downlink channels in a stadium. A design combining LAA with carrier aggregation allows carriers to off-load part of their data traffic on this unlicensed spectrum to offer a better data connection while saving on spectrum cost.

LTE Best Server RSRP, RSRQ

Network densification often implies an increase in the number of sectors to provide higher capacity in different zones of the stadiums. However, by doing so, it could generate new unwanted interferences between sectors, in turn negatively impacting the overall quality of data connectivity. LTE Nth Best Server RSRP, RSRQ allows to quickly pinpoint interfering sectors so that the design can be easily optimized for higher throughput.

Digitalization of stadium projects

With more frequent DAS network upgrades being done in stadiums involving many different players e.g., system integrators, equipment vendors, property owners, it is essential that there is a single digitalized document platform to simplify information sharing across all the parties and allow quick access to the right project information for design, review, and approval to achieve faster time to market for new capacity roll-out. iBwave Unity as a cloud-based digitalized design hub allows flexible data customization to seamlessly integrate project information specific to stadiums for example.

Conclusion

The entire industry is gearing up for 5G with high market expectations to enable new and fascinating use cases like VR/AR, driverless cars, massive IoT living, smart buildings and more.

Still, LTE and LTE Advanced will remain the key technologies to enable network densification needed to address the immediate surge of mobile broadband consumption.

It would be fair to say that network densification is also paving the road for 5G. iBwave is already committed to offering 5G mm-wave frequencies suited for providing more network off-load capacity in stadiums with direct line-of-sight. Network densification will be a never-ending story and iBwave will play a key role to make it a successful one.