RTT Technology Topics - 2003

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RTT Technology Topics

Every month we produce a technology topic that reflects current RTT research. These are sent to an elective list of engineering, marketing and business team leaders.
There are over 120 Topics archived on this site starting from August 1998.
The archive provides a free resource for researchers in the industry wishing to use past experience to validate technology, engineering, market and business decisions.

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2003 Title Synopsis
December Deterministic software Real time operating systems when used in isolation may deliver real time performance however ambiguity at the application layer can be amplified as the application moves down the protocol stack and may cause application and protocol instability.
November Multi service multi media networks A hardware-dominant model is better suited to delivering the determinism needed to manage end to end multimedia network performance including consistent end to end delay and no delay variability
October Multi media modeling Multi media mobile networks may be less downlink biased than present assumptions would suggest. This has a profound impact on future network topology.
September Cost benefits of WCDMA- facts and fiction The W-CDMA radio layer should deliver cost savings and performance gains including lower handset costs, lower node B costs and lower cost RF plumbing and planning. The less good news is that it may be harder to realize network and transport efficiencies and hence achieve lower network and transport costs. Either way, as with GSM, cost savings and performance gains will only be realized some 3 to 5 years after initial implementation (1995/1996 for GSM, 2006/2007 for W-CDMA) at which point the savings and margin gain opportunities may prove significant.
August EDGE data rates and coverage constraints With EDGE, changing channel conditions dictate user data rates. In W-CDMA, user data rates dictate the amount of bandwidth used. The benefits that come from implementing WCDMA are quality and consistency - a better, more consistent user experience based on variable data rates delivered over a constant quality channel
July The impact of the traffic mix shift on network hardware (2) The 'hidden costs' of using generic network processors in 3G network design.
June The impact of the traffic mix shift on network hardware (1) As session lengths increase and as we move towards fixed length packets and fixed routing trajectories it makes more sense to hardware switch and less sense to software switch.
May Multi-band multi-mode multi-media mobiles How the design brief for cellular handsets has expanded and the consequence in terms of component count, component cost and complexity
April Multi-user multi-format multi-media using M-PEG4 Delivering interoperability between multi-media mobile devices, the related impact on handset hardware and software partitioning
March Turbulent networks Networks don't always behave as expected - their behavior is is inconsistent with traditional queuing theory. The anecdotal experience is that as we move from voice to a mix of voice, data and multi-media, networks become progressively more badly behaved.
February The impact of handset hardware on the offered traffic mix and offered traffic value Handset hardware - the audio, image and video encoders and CCD or CMOS imaging devices have a direct impact on uplink offered traffic and uplink traffic value. Similarly display and display drivers and audio amplifiers determine downlink bandwidth quality and downlink bandwidth value. Quality in a multimedia exchange is hard though not impossible to define and can potentially encompass both actual and perceived quality metrics. Work already under way in the digital TV standards community points the way towards future 3G TV and 3G cellular billing and value integration.
January IP network processor performance limitations The performance metrics needed to preserve session value.