Global 4G Technology Summit during ITU Telecom World 2006

2006 4GMF theme - "Building the Tomorrow
for East Asia's mobile communications"

Official Launch of Fourth Generation Mobile Forum (4GMF)

2006 4GMF Honorable Keynote - "4G Technology - The Mobile FUTURE of China" by Ministerial Official of China Ministry of Information Industry or Ministry of Science & Technology

2006 4GMF Invited Keynote - "China 3G Licenses and 4G Development Roadmap" by Special Technical Advisor of related China National ICT Administrations

2006 4GMF Distinguished Keynotes by Primary Sponsors

The number of subscribers for mobile communications has increased much faster than predicted, particularly for terrestrial use. In the year 2000 the number of mobile subscribers was around 400 million worldwide and for the year 2010 more than 1.8 billion mobile subscribers are anticipated.

The majority of traffic is changing from speech-oriented communications to multimedia communications. It is also generally expected that due to the dominating role of mobile wireless access, the number of portable handsets will exceed the number of PCs connected to the Internet. Therefore, mobile terminals will be the major person-machine interface in the future instead of the PC. Due to the dominating role of IP based data traffic in the future the networks and systems have to be designed for economic packet data transfer. The expected new data services are highly bandwidth consuming. This results in higher data rate requirements for future systems.

The major step from the second generation to third generation and further to fourth generation was the ability to support advanced and wideband multimedia services, including e‑mail, file transfers, and distribution services like radio, TV and software provisioning (e.g. software download). These multimedia services can be symmetrical and asymmetrical services, real-time and non real-time services. External market studies have predicted that in Europe in the year 2010 more than 90 million mobile subscribers will use mobile multimedia services and will generate about 60 % of the traffic in terms of transmitted bits. Only in China, the DGI predicted that there will be over 600 million mobile phones in China by year 2008, and over 180 million for multimedia applications.

In the fourth generation mobile communication (4G mobile), the combination and convergence of the different worlds Information Technology (IT) industry, media industry and telecommunications will integrate communication with IT. As a result, mobile communications together with IT will penetrate into the various fields of the society.

In future 4G mobile communications, two economically contradictive demands will arise; ubiquity and diversity. Open, global and ubiquitous communications make people free from spatial and temporal constraints. Versatile communication systems will also be required to realize customized services based on diverse individual needs. The flexibility of mobile IT can satisfy these demands simultaneously. Therefore, mobile IT can be seen to play a key fundamental role in the 21^st century.

The user expectations are increasing with regard to a large variety of services and applications with different degree of quality of service (QoS), which is related to delay, data rate and bit error requirements. Therefore, seamless services and applications via different access systems and technologies that maximize the use of available spectrum will be the driving forces for future developments.

In addition, many types of objects as well as people will have network functions and will communicate with each other through networks. Therefore, different communication relationships such as person to person, machine to machine and mainly machine to person and vice versa, will determine mobile and wireless communications in the future.

Given the increasing demand for flexibility and individuality in society, the mean for the end-user might be assessed. Potentially, the value would be in the diversity of mobile applications, hidden from the complexity of the underlying communications schemes. This complexity would be absorbed into an intelligent personality management mechanism, which would learn and understand the needs of the user, and control the behavior of their reconfigurable and open wireless terminals accordingly in terms of application behavior and access to future support services.

In the future wireless service provision will be characterized by global mobile access (terminal and personal mobility), high quality of services (full coverage, intelligible, no drop and no/lower call blocking and latency), and easy and simple access to multimedia services for voice, data, message, video, world-wide web, GPS, etc. via one user terminal.

End-to-end secured services will be fully coordinated, via access control, authentication use of biometric sensors and/or smart card and mutual authentication, data integrity and encryption with no intermediate gateway(s) for decryption/re-encryption. User added encryption feature for higher level of security will be part of the system. 

The vision for the future development of 4G mobile is that there will be a steady and continuous evolution over the next 10 years. Beyond this timeframe, for future 4G systems, there may be a requirement for a new wireless access technology for the terrestrial component, sometime after 2010.

Considering how second generation systems have evolved by adding more and more system capabilities and enhancements to make them resemble the capabilities of 3G systems; it is possible that with third generation systems there may be a continuum of enhancements that will render those systems practically indistinguishable from future generation systems. Indeed, it is expected that it will be more difficult to identify distinct generation gaps and such a distinction may only be possible by looking back at some point in the future.

The vision from the user perspective can be implemented by integration of these different evolving and emerging access technologies in a common flexible and expandable platform to provide a multiplicity of possibilities for current and future services and applications to users in a single terminal. Systems of 4G mobile will mainly be characterized by a horizontal communication model, where different access technologies as cellular, cordless, WLAN type systems, short range connectivity and wired systems will be combined on a common platform to complement each other in an optimum way for different service requirements and radio environments which in my word called “Converged Broadband Wireless Core, or Open Wireless Architecture (OWA)”.

In addition to the above technologies, the critical issues for the mobile terminals are:

• New power technology – empower the intelligent mobile applications
• New transceiver technology – improve the receiving and transmitting performance for the future 4G mobile systems
• Open CAI (Common Air Interface) core interfaces – support the re-configurable and software radio architecture

The most important issue in developing this future-proven 4G mobile system is the Architecture. “Without good architecture, we are doing the worst thing (in mobile communications)”.

Therefore, this annual conference is very timely and valuable for those who are involved in the research and development of next generation mobile communications.

Welcome on board !

Prof. Willie W. Lu, Chief Architect
Technical Chairman and Co-Founder
Fourth Generation Mobile Forum (4GMF)
Palo Alto, California, United States
and
Executive Director, Center for Wireless Comm.
Member of Editorial Board, IEEE SPECTRUM
Former Member, U.S. FCC - Tech. Adv. Council
Senior Advisor, over 20 Authorities Worldwide
Consulting Professor, Stanford University

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