May 6, 2015

This April saw the first ever RAN working group meeting in Brazil. RAN4 was hosted in Rio de Janeiro by Qualcomm Inc. Keysight Technologies (formerly Agilent Technologies) and TIM Brasil. The meeting was inspired by the Brazilian Communication Ministry, and supported by CPqD Foundation, a Brazilian research institute who led the work in RAN4 to specify the “Brazilian” RF band 31 (450 MHz) back in 2012.

The technical work was typically intense and varied including topics such as requirements for UE receivers with four antennas, which have been in the core standards since Release 8 but never fully specified. Quadruple carrier aggregation is now in full swing as well as the highly topical licensed assisted access (LAA) work to define the co-existence between LTE and WLAN in the 5 GHz ISM band.

The work on radiated MIMO performance testing took a big step forwards with the agreement on a new measurement campaign to investigate harmonizing the four different proposed test methods. As well as these RF issues, the radio resource management (RRM) implications of dual connectivity (carrier aggregation with non ideal backhaul) was discussed at length and is proving to be a challenging area of work. Making the connection between RAN4’s work and reality, Keysight, one of the hosts, organized a hardware demonstration of dual carrier aggregation at 300 Mbps and a video demo showing triple carrier aggregation at over 450 Mbps.

On the day before the meeting around one third of the delegates joined a trip arranged by Moray Rumney from Keysight, one of the meeting hosts, to scale Corcovado Mountain to visit the famous statue “Cristo Redentor”. This landmark has a fascinating historic link with radio. During the opening ceremony in 1931, the statue was lit by a battery of floodlights turned on remotely by shortwave radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, stationed 5,700 miles away in Rome.

At the close of the meeting the RAN4 Chairman, Tuomo Säynäjäkangas, said: “It was a great pleasure to chair the first 3GPP RAN group meeting in the Southern Hemisphere. Planning took some time but eventually every minute was worth it. Meeting arrangements were excellent, like coffee break scenery which should be set as the standard! Let’s hope to come back in the future again.”

...Thanks Fabricio and Lucia, from CPqD, for all the support!

About RAN4

RAN WG4 works on the RF aspects of UTRAN/E-UTRAN. RAN WG4 performs simulations of diverse RF system scenarios and derives the minimum requirements for transmission and reception parameters, and for channel demodulation. Once these requirements are set, the group defines the test procedures that will be used to verify them (only for BS). Requirements for other radio elements, like Repeaters, are specified in the RAN WG4 as well.

See the Detailed Meeting Report at; http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/tsg_ran/WG4_Radio/TSGR4_74/ 

Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP