The European Commission has launched a new initiative to increase mobile broadband infrastructure capacity density in Europe by tenfold.
The Beyond Next-Generation Mobile Broadband (BuNGee) is a €4.7 million initiative is funded in large part by the European Commission that will draw upon collaboration among the consortium members comprising European service providers, technology equipment vendors, universities and research organizations.
WiMAX specialist Alvarion Ltd. will take a leadership role with the new effort, as the company’s CTO, Ze’ev Roth, will serve as BuNGee consortium’s project coordinator, working closely with other consortium member representatives.
Organized under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), the BuNGee consortium’s primary objective will be to increase the overall mobile network infrastructure capacity density to well beyond what current technologies are promising, targeting the challenging goal of 1gbps per square kilometer. The project will identify new network deployment strategies, especially suited for dense urban environments where market demand for wireless broadband access is highest. The BuNGee project is planned to continue through June 2012.
Other consortium member representatives will come from Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (Spain), Cobham Antenna Systems, Microwave Antennas (UK), University of York (UK), Thales Communications S.A. (France), Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (Poland), Siklu Communication Ltd (Israel) and ARTTIC (BE).
“We are thrilled and honored at the opportunity of working within the framework of a European Union’s FP7 project,” said Roth. “We look forward to collaborating with our fellow colleagues to take on the challenge of increasing the capacity density to 1 Gigabit per second per square kilometer for the mobile broadband networks of tomorrow.”
To achieve its stated objectives, the BuNGee project will target the following breakthroughs:
• Joint design of access and backhaul over licensed and license-exempt spectrum;
• Unconventional below-rooftop backbone solutions exploiting natural radio isolations;
• Beyond next-generation networked and distributed MIMO and interference techniques; and
• Autonomous architectures capitalising on very aggressive spatial and spectral reuse;
• Protocol suite facilitating autonomous ultra-high capacity deployment.
In order to prove the concepts proposed by BuNGee, towards the end of the project a live test will be conducted in the city of Barcelona which will test real life scenarios and demonstrate the superiority of BuNGee’s architecture for mobile networks. The deployment strategy will be based on below-rooftop deployment of access base stations leveraging existing structures as utility poles in coordination with self backhauling of these access base stations by wireless links. The consortium expects that this approach will drastically lower CAPEX and OPEX relative to traditional mobile deployment methods, thereby significantly lowering the bit per second per square kilometer cost of the access network.
