CW Journal, Vol 1, Issue 1

C O N N E C T I N G T H E D I G I T A L W O R L D
Volume one. Issue one.
cambridgewireless.co.uk
AUTOMATION
THE DRIVE FOR
DRIVERLESS CARS
FLEXIBLE DUPLEXING
CRACKING DOWN HARD
ON SELF-INTERFERENCE
CWIC 2017
BRIDGING THE
GENERATION GAPS
FLEXIBLE RADIO
HETEROGENEOUS
NETWORK SLICING
MU-MIMO
ELASTIC RAN
LPWAN
MIMO
GUARANTEED BIT RATE
N F V
MMIMO
W I D E B A N D
DENSIFICATION
SLICING
SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY
SPLIT CLOUD RAN ARCHITECTURE
HETNETNGMN
IT’S THE
FUTURE
IT’S TAKING SHAPE NOW
BUT HOW WILL IT BE
DELIVERED?

3
Issue One. Volume One.
PORTRAITSCHARLESSTURMANPHOTOGRAPHY,WWW.STURMAN.CO.UK.
06
THE ROAD TO 5G: WE’RE TALKING
ABOUT MY GENERATION
If you believe the hype you’d think 5G
was already rolled out. CW Journal
reveals the ongoing debate around
standards and industry needs.
12
FLEXIBLE DUPLEXING: NO MORE
SELF INTERFERENCE
Could it soon be possible to transmit
and receive on the same frequency at
the same time? Dr Leo Laughlin
examines the technology.
19
THE INTERNET OF THINGS:
DOUBLING DOWN ON DATA
It’s too easy to get hung up on IoT
standards and the end of 2G when
what matters is understanding how to
mine the data, as Nick Hunn explains.
22
THE BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY IN
LPWAN IS BIG BUSINESS
Connecting everything requires
batteries that can last for a decade
and sustainable bandwidth.
Ian Volans looks at the options.
23
DRIVERLESS CARS COMING OUR
WAY, FASTER THAN YOU THINK
The March CWIC Starter on
automotive looked at the technologies
that will make driverless cars happen.
24
CAMBRIDGE WIRELESS
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
2017
Bridging the generational divide is
more than teaching your gran to text,
as the conference discussed ways to
make technologies useful for everyone.
28
OPTICAL NETWORKING,
THE TIP OF THE
INFRASTRUCTURE ICEBERG
Facebook and BT are among many
industry leaders backing the Telecoms
Infra Project, an engineering plan to
improve communications.
30
SIG NEWS SECURITY
Tim Phipps, security SIG champion,
explains four approaches the group
has looked at to tackle cyber crime.
32
WIRELESS HERITAGE
A CW SIG trip to the Science
Museum’s Information Age gallery
revealed much about the institution’s
ongoing role in society.
WELCOME TO THE FIRST ISSUE of the CW
Journal, which is intended to assist CW and CW
members in the organisation’s primary goals: to
Network, Learn and Grow. In particular, we’d like
to keep CW members informed about events and
discussions which may have passed them by.
The Journal will also be publishing technical
articles, and we will not shy away from equations or circuit
diagrams. Our articles will not be formally peer reviewed, but
they are examined before publication by our Editorial Board.
We believe that this will give us greater timeliness and
flexibility than an academic journal, but more rigour than is
generally found in ordinary journalism. We
certainly expect to see vigorous debates on these
pages, but they will always be among colleagues,
and it will always be the Journal’s aim to start
conversations rather than finish them.
The Journal actively seeks contributions from the
membership, so if you have a different insight or a
new idea, please get in touch. Let us know your thoughts even
if you haven’t time to write for us, as we will continually review
our operations in light of the feedback we receive. Enjoy the
magazine, and I hope to see you at CW events this year.
Lewis Page, Editor, CW Journal
CW Journal is published by CWJPress on behalf of Cambridge Wireless.
CW Journal is published on behalf of Cambridge Wireless (CW) by CWJ Press Limited. All rights reserved. Articles may not be reproduced without written permission from Cambridge Wireless. Opinions, comments and views included
in the journal are not necessarily those of Cambridge Wireless or the publisher. While every care is taken in compiling the content, neither Cambridge Wireless or the publisher assumes responsibility for effects arising from this publication.
Editor Lewis Page. Sub Editor Ed Pearcey. Creative Director Matthew Inman. Associate Publisher David Chow. Publisher Simon Rockman. Business Development Director Roger Hinkson 01223 670670
Submissions: editorial@cwjpress.com Advertising: roger@cwjpress.com General: enquiries@cwjpress.com
C W B OA R D Raj Gawera, Chairman. Dr. David Cleevely, CBE. Zahid Ghadialy. Faye Holland. Sylvia Lu. Graham Pink. Stephen Unger. Peter Whale
C W E DI TOR I A L B OA R D Chairmain. Professor John Haine. Dr. David Cleevely. Nick Hunn. Sylvia Lu. Tony Milbourn. Vicky Sleight. Gaye Soykok. Andy Sutton. Paul Tindall. William Webb
CW (Cambridge Wireless Ltd), The Bradfield Centre, Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge, CB4 0GA T: 01223 967 101. E: admin@cambridgewireless.co.uk
Cambridge Wireless Journal is the new, old
technology way, for Cambridge Wireless members to
get more from the organisation. Through the
Cambridge Wireless Special Interest Groups we run
over fifty events yearly, but nobody can be at them all.
Under our remit of Network, Learn, Grow, the
Journal provides a shop window of CW activities for
non-members in the industry, and encourages
members to get involved with various SIGs.
In this first issue we look at many aspects of 5G, from
the hype to the reality. Also, Dr Leo Laughlin’s article
looks at how his Bristol University team is making the
most advanced radio science a commercial reality by
taking a broader approach to the problems of design.
The journal is overseen by a distinguished Editorial
Board. I encourage members to get involved. Please
email editorial@cwjpress.com. And if this is not your
issue and you’d like to be added to the mailing list
please email subscriptions@cwjpress.com.
Robert Driver, CEO, Cambridge Wireless

4
2
APPLE
THE LAST 12 MONTHS HAS been
busy for CW, with 27 Special Interest
Group events, a rebrand, and the
creation of the CW Journal.
The rebranding project is a
significant milestone and one that
celebrates not only CW’s mission of
‘Connecting the digital world’ but its
rich history too.
CW was first known as Cambridge
3G some 17 years ago, and was
founded to pioneer the roll out of 3G
networks. The organisation has now
grown to over 400 UK and
international members involved in the
digital world.
The idea for Cambridge 3G was first
conceived by Dr David Cleevely CBE,
then Managing Director of Analysys,
and Edward Astle, then chairman of
3G LAB.
“Our original aim was to put
Cambridge at the forefront of 3G
technology,” said David Cleevely.
“Plans were put into
place in early
board meetings to
set up an
‘Applications Test
Network (ATN)’
with Vodafone UK,
which would act as
a forum for
developers to test
their applications
on a live 3G network.”
Rob Morland, Director of Astutim,
who joined the Cambridge 3G board
in 2003, played a significant role in
developing the ATN.
“The ATN initiative was successful in
installing Vodafone base stations across
Cambridge; however when we
launched in 2004 3G was already at a
market defined stage,” said Rob
Morland. “The board was of the
opinion that we should make the
organisation independent of cellular
technology and broaden the remit,”
and so ‘Cambridge Wireless’ was born.
Under the new brand, the network
moved from strength to strength. The
next five years saw the introductions of
the first Future of Wireless
International Conference (now the CW
International Conference) and
Discovering Start-Ups Competition.
In 2013, Cambridge Wireless
rebranded as CW, acknowledging that
the network is pushing towards
becoming a national and international
community encompassing a diverse set
of hi-tech companies.
Fast forward to the present day and
CW is still a key hub for industry
experts to network, learn and grow – a
mission statement that underpins our
membership.
“Looking through the archives it’s
clear that CW would not be here
without the enterprise of those who
were there right from the beginning,”
said CW CEO Robert Driver.
“CW now reflects the fact that the
organisation draws 30% of its members
from Cambridge, but also that tech
disrupts every sector. We now have
deep learning software companies,
automotive manufacturers, and utilities
within our membership, with a great
emphasis on mixing together start-ups,
small companies and the larger players,”
Robert Driver concluded.
CW, THROUGH
THE YEARS
The CW Journal is the
latest in initiatives that
Cambridge Wireless has
introduced since it was
founded. As we launch
both the new branding and
magazine, We look back at
our progress over the last
17 years
If you’ve found an
article in the Journal
interesting and
would like to share
it with your Twitter
followers just scan
the QR Code and it
will generate a URL
which fires up your
Twitter client and
populates it with a
link to the online
version of the article
and a brief
description which
you can edit before
posting.
SCAN TO TWEETSCAN TO TWEET
QR CODES IN
EVOLVING
IDENTITY
As technology
companies continue
to reinvent and
evolve, it seems only
natural for CW to
move with the times,
with a new logo and
colour scheme.
Volume one. Issue one.
AUTOMATION
THE DRIVE FOR
DRIVERLESS CARS
FLEXIBLE DUPLEXING
CRACKING DOWN HARD
ON SELF-INTERFERENCE
CWIC 2017
BRIDGING THE
GENERATION GAPS
FLEXIBLE RADIO
HETEROGENEOUS
NETWORK SLICING
MU-MIMO
ELASTIC RAN
LPWAN
MIMO
GUARANTEED BIT RATE
N F V
MMIMO
W I D E B A N D
DENSIFICATION
SLICING
SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY
SPLIT CLOUD RAN ARCHITECTURE
HETNETNGMN
IT’S THE
FUTURE
IT’S TAKING SHAPE NOW
BUT HOW WILL IT BE
DELIVERED?
CWJ_Issue1_v2.indd 1 04/07/2017 10:13

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6
THE ROAD TO 5G:
WE’RE TALKING
ABOUT MY
GENERATION
In fact, we could be for a while, with detailed definitions, standards,
required speeds, and industry needs all still up for debate

7
W
ITH ALL THE
world talking
about 5G one
could be
forgiven for
thinking that it’s
a vitally important standard, and already
providing a useful service. The press is
awash with articles about 5G chips being
built, 5G networks deployed, and 5G
applications developed: well, that’s
quite an achievement for a standard
which hasn’t been written yet, and won’t
even be completed for another few years
at least.
Agreeing every detail of the standard
might take a while, but the first parts of it
will be set out as soon as next year and
the broad concepts are already all in
place. We know what 5G is supposed to
be able to do, and the standard is setting
a very high bar.
We’re told 5G devices should connect
to a network in a hundredth of a second,
download data at 20 Gigabits per
second, with a latency of less than a
millisecond, and all for less cost (both
capital expenditure, or capex, and
operating expenditure, or opex) than
today’s networks.
Quite how the standard plans to
achieve this will be our subject here, and
we’ll also discuss why the numbers above
are so important.
Generational changes are becoming
hard to quantify (see sidebar) but the
3GPP – the international body generally
recognised as being responsible for
establishing what “5G” should do
– has been quite specific:
• Mobile broadband peak data rate
should be 20Gbps for downlink and
10Gbps for uplink
• Low-latency communications should
offer a latency of less than half of a
millisecond
• The design of the RAN architecture
should enable lower capex/opex,
with respect to current networks, and
achieve the same level of services
• The 3GPP has decided to accelerate
development of enhanced Mobile
BroadBand, or eMBB, and in March
this year announced that it
had agreed to have “an
5G is also being
touted as the
technological
solution for
connecting billions
of “things”, from
gas valves to baby
carriages. These
items are
expected to form
part of a huge
industrial market,
but various
industries will
need to tread very
carefully to avoid
undermining their
existing efforts,
creating confusion,
and developing
multiple standards.
Wide area
networks are
already being
deployed to
connect all these
things, but it’s not
just the traditional
CSPs that are
building them.
Networks
operating in
unlicensed radio
bands – such as
Sigfox, LoRa,
RPMA and
Weightless – are
enabling a new
generation of
mobile operator
which doesn’t
need billion-dollar
investments in
radio spectrum or
infrastructure. In
fact, these upstart
competitors are
already claiming
national coverage
in some regions.
In response, the
3GPP has
developed LTE-Cat
M1 and Cat-NB1.
The former is a
half-way house
carrying voice as
well as data, while
the latter (also
known as NB-IoT)
is seen as a direct
competitor to the
upstart operations.
NB-IoT networks
are being rolled out
(albeit slowly)
despite the fact
that this is often a
case of software
upgrades rather
than new
hardware.
Gas valve and
baby carriage use
means a lifespan
measured in
decades. So, if the
mobile industry is
to avoid being
usurped by Sigfox,
LoRa, et al, then
the commitment
to NB-IoT has to
be wholehearted
and for the long
haul.
That means that
NB-IoT will need to
be (and some
would say it
already is) part of
the 5G standard,
or at least
compatible with it.
So, expect to see
NB-IoT neatly
folded into the 5G
standard with the
minimum of fuss.
ANOTHER STANDARD
ISSUE FOR THE
INTERNET OF THINGS

8
intermediate milestone for the
early completion of the non-
standalone (NSA) 5G New
Radio (NR) mode for an eMBB
use-case”.
THE NEED FOR SPEED
(AND FREQUENCY BANDS)
The headline-grabbing speed of 5G is
only practical using very high
frequencies. Today’s mobile networks
are squeezed between existing radio
users – and contiguous blocks of radio
spectrum are rare – but the high
frequencies (24GHz, 28GHz, even
39GHz) aren’t full of omnidirectional
emitters, though they are used for
highly directional point-to-point links.
This means that 5G technology
placed there can stretch out and relax.
A current 3G radio signal occupies
5MHz of radio spectrum, but
Qualcomm’s latest (pre-standard) 5G
chip can fill 800MHz, and up above
6GHz there’s more than enough room
to do so.
Bands above 6GHz haven’t been
used for mobile in the past because
they’re hard to work with, offering
very short range and limited
penetration. A 28GHz signal will
struggle to penetrate a building, unless
there’s a lucky line of sight through a
window, but with enough base stations
it’s possible to provide coverage.
Those base stations will need to be
close together, so think lamp posts, not
hilltop transmitters – and consider the
problems of wrapping directional
antennas round the outside of lamp
posts. Fortunately, high frequencies
does mean small antennas so this
might not be insurmountable.
Away from city streets longer range
will be needed, so 5G will have to
squeeze into available slots at 3.5GHz,
or the newly-vacated TV channels
around 600MHz.
These broadcast TV frequencies
aren’t as empty as the high-frequency
bands, but they can slice through
buildings over distance. There will
also be the option of using legacy LTE
bands. So, to provide universal service
5G networks will use a combination of
radio bands, and offer those headline
1ST GENERATION
The first generation of
cellular networks used an
analogue radio
transmission, were
unencrypted, and had
laughable security and
poor authentication. But
they were also, without
doubt, a technological and
social revolution.
It is the analogue encoding
which defines these as
First Generation, and
(coincidentally) meant you
could tune into a phone call
using nothing more
complex than a radio
receiver (a fact that surely
must have come as a big
surprise to Prince Charles
and Lady Di).
2ND GENERATION
By the middle of the 1980s
it was clear that better
standards were needed.
These are collectively
known as “2nd Generation”
as they use digital
encoding, have some form
of cryptographic
protection, as well as
incorporating a
reasonably-secure
authentication system.
In Europe, GSM was
defined and regularly
enhanced during its life.
GPRS, or General Packet
Radio Service, provided
data, and was itself
enhanced with EDGE
(Enhanced Data rates for
GSM Evolution) for faster
data services.
3RD GENERATION
The networks fully
expected that 3G would be
used for video calling,
which in fact turned out to
be obscenely expensive
and not very useful.
Fortunately, the net had
come along and made data
sexy, so users quickly filled
the 384kb/s, wanted more
speed, and things started
to get complicated.
High Speed Packet Access
(HSPA) can be appended to
3G to ramp up the speed.
For some marketeers
(notably those at T-Mobile
USA) that was enough to
claim a “4G” moniker, while
others tried out a “3-point-
something” label.
When surveyed it seems
that the public thinks
“3G+” is faster than “3.5G”,
and “3.75G” is faster still,
but none of these terms
term have any meaning
outside a telco’s marketing
department.
4TH GENERATION
This is generally
recognised to be LTE (Long
Term Evolution), but at
launch LTE just wasn’t fast
enough. The top speed of
LTE was only 300Mbps,
and by this time the 3GPP
had agreed with the ITU
that this was not 4G.
Clearly the operators
deploying LTE (and WiMAX)
would have to advertise it
as “3.9G”, or something like
that. Wouldn’t they?
Undaunted, many
marketeers just went
ahead and announced they
had 4G networks and/or
handsets. Eventually the
ITU (and, by extension, the
3GPP) admitted defeat and
agreed that both LTE and
WiMAX could be called
“4G” even if they weren’t
really.
The moniker “True 4G” is
sometimes used nowadays
for networks or equipment
matching the original
criteria, but it’s not widely
employed as it does rather
imply that any previous 4G
claim might have been
untrue.
Also it doesn’t fit well next
to signal-strength bars on
a smartphone screen.
5TH GENERATION
Which brings us up to date
– with marketeers cherry
picking technical
standards while radio
engineers look on with
horror at the mishmash of
technologies that will soon
be sporting a “5G” sticker.
What a world!
It may seem as though mobile telephony has progressed smoothly through the generations,
climbing a clear staircase of technologies and following usefully-numbered innovations. Sadly,
this is far from the truth. The days when radio engineers put names on things are long gone, if
they ever existed. Today, it’s the marketeers who decide in which generation a specific
technology might fall, and we’re only going to go further down that path.
SUBTLE CHANGES THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

9
latency of less than 1ms won’t have a
massive impact on the overall latency,
unless other technologies and
techniques are harnessed and adapted
to reduce the travel time.
To reduce latency to these levels,
the number of stages of packet routing
has to be drastically reduced. A good
deal of the cloud processing has to be
moved right to the edge of the
network, “If the brain controlling a
drone is located in the nearest base
station then low latency is much easier
to achieve, simply because the data
isn’t travelling so far. We can’t put
drone brains into every base station,
so 5G base stations will have to have
flexible hardware capable of taking on
whatever edge processing is needed.
The decision-making logic of our
putative drone will have to travel
with it, jumping from base station to
base station so it’s never far from the
drone itself.
KEEPING IT REAL (AND CHEAP)
Meanwhile let’s not forget that 5G
networks are supposed to be cheaper
to build, and run, than existing
networks. Network intelligence can go
a long way to reducing costs –
self-configuring small cells should be
cheaper to fit, and self-organising
networks can reduce management
costs.
However, those advantages must be
weighed against the number of cells
needed, and the cost of radio
spectrum for them to use.
THE QUESTION IS REALLY
JUST “WHY?”
The ultimate question facing 5G is not
what, or how, but why. What
applications need (and will pay for)
network speeds measured in tens of
gigabits a second? A single 5G
connection, at 20Gbs, will be able to
carry 800 simultaneous video streams
in Ultra HD. Mobile developers have,
over the years, excelled at filling the
available bandwidth, but this could
challenge even them.
Ultra-low latency sounds really cool,
but to make it work we also need
edgecloud microservers to minimise
routing delay.
We are entering a new world, where
the limitation on our connectivity now
isn’t the last mile. As an industry we
have, quite rightly, been obsessed with
the limitations of last-mile
connectivity. With 5G, those limits
disappear into the distance, revealing
new choke points and new challenges
for a new generation of wireless apps.
In this context the UK
Government’s published 5G strategy1
,
which will create a “new national 5G
Innovation Network to trial and
demonstrate 5G applications” is very
welcome.
1.NEXTGENERATIONMOBILETECHNOLOGIES:A5GSTRATEGYFORTHEUKHTTPS://WWW.GOV.UK/GOVERNMENT/
PUBLICATIONS/NEXT-GENERATION-MOBILE-TECHNOLOGIES-A-5G-STRATEGY-FOR-THE-UK
speeds only at the higher frequencies.
NO MORE WAITING ON THE
WORLD WIDE WEB
Speed is one thing, but increasingly
important is latency. This is the time it
takes for a request to be answered,
such as asking for a web page, and
that web page starting to arrive back
on your device.
Ofcom, the UK’s broadcasting and
telecoms regulator, measured latency
on the UK mobile networks in 2015,
finding that networks based on 3G
standards would respond in 63.5ms,
while 4G networks could get a
response back in 53.1ms.
That might seem impressive –
100ms is considered fine for online –
but if you are directing a self-driving
car you need a faster network.
The 5G standards call for latency
of less than 1ms, which is certainly
faster, but is going to be much harder
to achieve. As a comparison, 4G has
a theoretical latency of 10ms or so,
meaning that the vast majority of the
latency that Ofcom found wasn’t
caused by the radio communications
but by the controlling network,
and the connection to the server
being queried.
Reducing the radio component to a
MOBILE DEVELOPERS HAVE ALWAYS
EXCELLED AT FILLING THE AVAILABLE
BANDWIDTH, BUT 5G’S HUGE CAPACITY
COULD CHALLENGE EVEN THEM
SIMON ROCKMAN
Publisher, CW Journal
Simon is an experienced technology writer and
was Editor of Personal Computer World in the
late 1980s and created the world’s first
consumer magazine about telecoms, What
Mobile. He has held senior roles at Motorola,
Sony Mobile, and the GSMA. He is also founder
of Fuss Free Phones, a unique MVNO catering
for the needs of older people.
SCAN
TO
TWEET
for the needs of older people.

The data, reproduced in the graph (top right),
shows the number of European patent filings
per million inhabitants in 2015. Switzerland
comes out on top, with 873 applications per
million inhabitants, whilst the UK sits 16th on
the list with only 79 applications per million
inhabitants. This means that Switzerland has
over ten times as many European patent filings
as the UK, per million inhabitants.
Additional data, provided by the World
Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)2
,
shows resident patent filings per £100bn GDP
for the last 10 years - see the graph (bottom
right). The UK is at the bottom of the pile,
flat-lining at only about one filing per £100m
GDP. In 2015, the USA beat the UK by a factor
of about two and Korea beat the UK by a factor
of over ten.
Is the UK one
of the least
inventive
countries?
A recent document published by
the European Patent Office (EPO)
includes a graph which claims
to be “measuring inventiveness”
of the world’s leading economies
using the ratio of European
patent filings to population1
.

These graphs show slightly di erent things.
One shows European patent filings, the other
shows resident patent filings (i.e. filing in a
resident s home patent o ce). owever
they both ma e the same point loud and
clear - UK companies file significantly fewer
patent applications, in relative terms, than
their competitors in other countries.
What is less clear is why the numbers are so
low. roadly spea ing, there are two possible
e planations.
One is that the UK really is less inventive than
the rest of the world - as the EPO graph
would have you believe. We would li e to
thin that s not true - the UK is renowned in
the world of innovation, with UK inventors
famously having invented the telephone, the
world wide web, and recently even the
holographic television, to name but a few.
A more plausible e planation is that the UK
has a di erent patent filing culture , which
originates from a number of factors
● There is a lower general awareness
of the value of patents
● Some UK tech companies attempt to
obtain competitive advantage in other
ways, for e ample by going to mar et as
uic ly as possible or relying on trade
secrets
● uch of UK innovation originates with
smaller enterprises who are either not
aware of the value of patents, or who find
the costs involved in obtaining patents
prohibitive (compare this with Samsung
and G who account for Korea s top
ran ing)
● If they do file patents at all, UK companies
often file a single all-encompassing
bloc buster application, compared with
apanese or Korean companies which tend
to file a series of applications for
incremental improvements, creating
a so-called patent thic et
● Some UK innovation is in sectors not
traditionally associated with patents
- for instance computer games or financial
technology
ear in mind that the UK s anti-patent culture
is by no means universal - ust as A
oldings. Soft an s £2 bn ta eover was
the biggest ever tech deal in the UK, and the
ma ority of that value can be attributed to
A s patent portfolio.
So the reasons are many and varied, but the
message to UK companies is clear your
international competitors are li ely to be
filing more patents than you, and you need
a strategy that ta es this into account.
This might involve filing more patent
applications, or simply becoming more aware
of your competitors patent portfolios.
Withers & Rogers is one of the leading
intellectual propert la fir s in the
an Europe he o er a ree
intro uctor eeting or telephone
con ersation to co panies that nee
counsel on atters relating to patents
tra e ar s esigns an strategic P
or ore in or ation call
or isit ithersrogers co
European Patent Filings per Million Inhabitants in 2015
Resident Patent Filings per £100 Billion GDP
3000
0
4000
6000
7000
8000
9000
2000
5000
1000
10000
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Republic of Korea
Japan
China
USA
United Kingdom
Matthew Pennington
mpennington@withersrogers.com
Jim Ribeiro
jribeiro@withersrogers.com
CWJ SPECIAL FEATURE IN ASSOCIATION
WITH WITHERS&ROGERS
N
etherlands
Sw
itzerland
Finland
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eden
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enm
arkG
erm
any
Austria
Belgium
Japan
France
Israel
U
nited
States
Rep.ofKorea
Ireland
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orw
ay
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KSingapore
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0
400
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900
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O O O E P E E O
O E O E O
1
EPOATSADIGUES20162
TTPIPSTATS.WIPO.ITIPSTAT2

12
T
EN YEARS AGO A
smartphone would
typically support just a
few standards operating
in perhaps four GSM
bands, and maybe a couple for
WCDMA or CDMA2000. Since there
were only a small number of frequency
bands to choose from, some degree of
global harmonisation was achieved via
a “quad-band” GSM phone, which
used the 850/900/1800/1900MHz
bands, and worked anywhere in the
world (well, just about).
This was a huge benefit for travellers,
and also brought with it a huge
economy of scale for device
manufacturers, who only needed to
make a few models (or possibly just one)
for the entire global market. Fast
forward to today, and GSM remains
the only radio access technology for
which global roaming has become a
reality. By the way, just in case you
didn’t know, GSM is being phased out.
Any smartphone worth the name
needs to support 4G, 3G and 2G
access, with many and varied RF front-
end requirements for bandwidth,
transmit power, receiver sensitivity, and
a host of other parameters.
Moreover, because of the fragmented
availability of spectrum across the
globe the 4G standard covers a very
large number of bands in order to allow
operators to deploy it in the frequencies
available in any particular region –
currently a total of 50 bands, as defined
in the LTE standards1
. A true “world
phone” would have to be capable of
operating in all of these.
TALK,TALK,LISTEN,LISTEN
A key problem that any cellular radio
device has to address is “duplexing”.
When we talk, we listen at the same
time. Early radio systems used “push to
talk” (and some still do), but when we
talk on the phone we expect to hear the
other party as they interrupt. The first
(analogue) generation of cellular devices
used “diplexing filters” (or duplexers) to
receive the downlink without being
“deafened” by transmitting the uplink
at a different frequency.
FLEXIBLE DUPLEXING: NO MORE SELF-INTERFERENCE
Today’s smartphones
support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,
GPS, 2G, 3G and 4G. As
new requirements appear,
designing low-cost radio
systems which can do
everything will become
even harder

13
Making these filters small and cheap
was a major problem for early handset
makers. When GSM came along the
design of the protocol allowed the
transceiver to be “half duplex”.
This was a pretty clever way to
eliminate the duplexer, and one
important factor helping GSM to
become a cheap, high volume
technology able to dominate the
industry (and change the way humans
communicate in the process).
Sadly, that technological problem-
solving lesson was soon forgotten in the
techno-political wars of the early days
of 3G, which in its now dominant
frequency-division duplexing (FDD)
form needs a duplexer for each
operating FDD band. Without doubt
the rush to LTE has imposed an ever
greater element of cost.
While there are bands in which time-
division duplexing, or TDD (where the
radio switches quickly back and forth
between transmit and receive) can be
used, these are smaller in number. Most
operators, those in Asia largely being
the exception, favour the FDD bands,
of which there are over 30.
The legacy of TDD and FDD
Aalborg, Denmark, have developed a
“Smart Antenna Front End” (SAFE)
architecture2-3
, which uses (see inset on
page 14) separate antennas for
transmitting and receiving, combining
these with (relaxed performance)
tunable filtering to achieve the required
transmit-to-receive isolation.
While the performance is impressive,
the need for two antennas is a
substantial drawback. As phones
become thinner and sleeker, the space
allocated for the antennas gets ever
smaller.
Multiple antennas are also needed in
mobile devices for spatial multiplexing
(MIMO). A 2x2 MIMO-capable
phone based on the SAFE architecture
would require a total of four antennas.
Moreover, the tuning range of these
filters and antennas is limited.
A world phone would therefore also
require the duplication of this front-end
architecture in order to cover all LTE
bands (which range from 450MHz to
3600MHz), requiring yet more
antennas, more antenna tuners, and
more filters, and bringing us back to
the familiar problem of achieving
multi-band operation through
spectrum, the difficulty of liberating
truly global bands, and the coming of
5G with even more bands, makes the
duplexing problem even harder.
Promising techniques being
investigated include novel filter-based
designs and the possibility of cancelling
self-interference.
The latter also leads to the possibility
of “division free” duplex (or “In-band
Full-duplex”) that has some promise. In
the 5G future of mobile communication
we will perhaps need to look at not just
FDD and TDD but flexible duplexing
based on these new techniques.
A NOVEL FILTER-BASED DUPLEXING
TECHNIQUE
Researchers from the University of
Electrical balance
duplexing has been used
since the early days of
wired telephony17
. In a
telephone system, the
microphone and earpiece
must both be connected
to the telephone line, but
isolated from one-another
to prevent the user’s own
speech deafening them to
the much weaker incoming
audio signal. This was
achieved in pre-electronic
telephones using a hybrid
transformer.
The duplexing circuit
shown in A below matches
the impedance of the
transmission line with a
resistor of the same value,
such that current from the
microphone is split when
entering the transformer,
flowing through the
primary coil in opposite
directions. The magnetic
fluxes effectively cancel
out, inducing no net
current in the secondary
coil, which is therefore
isolated from the
microphone.
However, the signals from
the microphone are still
coupled to the telephone
line (albeit with some loss),
and incoming signals on
the telephone line are still
coupled to the speaker
(also with some loss), thus
allowing bi-directional
communication through
the same wire.
The wireless electrical
balance duplexer is
analogous to the
telephone duplexer, but
replaces the microphone,
earpiece, and telephone
line with the transmitter,
receiver, and antenna
respectively, as is clearly
shown in B.
THE
REINVENTION
OF THE
ELECTRICAL
BALANCE
DUPLEXER
Fig. A Fig. B
Hydrid
transformer
Microphone
Earpiece
Z bal
Telephone exchange
Telephone line
Self-interference
detection
Balancing Impedance
control
PA
A
B
T R
LNA
RECEIVER
DSP
Hydrid transformer
ADCADC
x/2
Z bal
BARE
ESSENTIALS
Android OS inventor,
Andy Rubin’s Essential
phone has the very
latest in connectivity,
ranging from Bluetooth
5.0LE with a wide range
of GSM/LTE and WiFi
antennas hidden in its
titanium frame.
DISOBEYART/ESSNEITAL

14
The cancellation itself generally has
multiple stages. A directional network
between the antenna and the transceiver
gives a first level of separation between
the transmit and receive signals. Second,
additional analogue and digital signal
processing is used to cancel out the
remaining self-
interference in the
received signal. The
first stage can use
separate antennas (as
in SAFE); a hybrid
transformer (as
described below); or
a circulator.
The problems with
separate antennas
have been described
already. Circulators
tend to be narrow
band as they use a
ferromagnetic
resonance in a crystal. The hybrid – or
“Electrical Balance Isolation” (EBI) – is
a promising technique that can be
wideband and could potentially be
integrated on-chip.
ELECTRICAL BALANCE DUPLEXERS
Several research groups within
academia and industry are studying the
use of hybrids for duplexing11-16
. These
circuits cancel SI passively, allowing for
simultaneous transmission and
reception from a single antenna but
isolating the transmitter and receiver.
They are inherently broadband, and
can also be implemented on-chip,
making it an attractive choice for
implementing frequency duplexing in
mobile devices.
Recent advances demonstrate that
FDD transceivers using EBI can be
made in CMOS (complementary metal-
oxide-semiconductor) with insertion
loss, noise figure, receiver linearity, and
blocker rejection characteristics suitable
for cellular applications11,12,13
. However,
there is a fundamental limitation which
has affected the duplex isolation, as can
be seen in many examples in academic
and scientific literature.
The impedance of a radio antenna is
not fixed but varies with operating
frequency (because antennas are
component duplication.
Whilst it may be possible to fit a
larger number of antennas within a
tablet or laptop, further advances in
tunability and/or miniaturisation will
be needed for this technique to be
suitable for smartphones.
SELF-INTERFERENCE
CANCELLATION
A third way to isolate the transmitter
from receiver is to cancel out the self-
interference (SI), thus subtracting the
transmitted signal from the received
signal. Cancellation techniques have
been used in radar and broadcasting for
several decades.
For example, in the early 1980s,
Plessey developed and sold a product
based on SI cancellation called
“Groundsat” for range extension of
half-duplex analog FM military
communication networks4-5
.
The system acted as a full-duplex
on-frequency repeater, extending the
effective range of the half duplex radios
in use across the area of operation.
More recently, largely due to the
trend towards short-range (cellular and
Wi-Fi) communication, which makes
the problem of SI cancellation easier to
deal with due to lower transmit and
higher receive powers, there has been
interest in self-interference cancellation
for use in consumer wireless access and
backhaul applications6-8
.
In division-free duplex applications,
self-interference cancellation could
increase spectral efficiency by allowing
use of the same spectral resources for
uplink and downlink9,10
. Self-
interference cancellation techniques
could also be used to create a tunable
duplexer for FDD.
~25 dB isolation ~25 dB isolation
The smart antenna front-end
design, depicted below, uses
two narrowband tunable
antennas: one for
transmitting and one for
receiving, and a pair of lower
performance but tunable
duplexing filters. The
separate antennas not only
provide some passive
isolation through the
propagation loss between
them, but are also designed
to have a limited (but
tuneable) instantaneous
bandwidth.
The transmitting antenna
operates efficiently only in
the transmit band, and the
receiving antenna operates
efficiently only in the receive
band. By doing this the
antennas themselves also
act as filters, with the out-of-
band Tx emissions being
attenuated by the
transmitting antenna, and the
self-interference in the Tx
band being attenuated by the
receiving antenna.
This architecture therefore
requires that the antennas
are tunable, which is achieved
through the use of antenna
tuning networks. The antenna
tuning network has some
unavoidable insertion loss.
However, recent advances in
MEMS tunable capacitors18
have substantially increased
the quality factor of these
devices, thereby reducing
losses. The Rx insertion loss
is around 3dB, which is
comparable to the loss of
SAW duplexer and switches
combined.
The antenna-based isolation
is then supplemented by the
tunable filters, also based on
MEMs tunable capacitors3
,
aiming to achieving 25dB of
isolation from the antennas
and 25dB of isolation from
the filters. Prototypes have
demonstrated this is
achievable.
THE “SMART
ANTENNA
FRONT-END”
TRANSMITTER
RECEIVER
LNA
LNA
APPLE
ADVANTAGE
APPLE
Apple’s iPhones
(with a little help
from Qualcomm)
arguably have the
world’s best
wireless and LTE
connectivity with
support for 16 LTE
bands on a single
chipset. This
means it only has
to make two SKUs
to cover GSM and
CDMA markets

15
resonant) and time (because of inter-
action with the changing environment).
This means the balancing impedance
has to adapt to track impedance
variations, and the isolation is band-
limited, because of the frequency
domain variation13
(see figure 1).
Our work at the University of Bristol
has focussed on investigating and
mitigating these performance
limitations in order to demonstrate that
the required transmit-to-receive
isolation and bandwidth can be
achieved in realistic use cases.
To overcome the antenna
impedance fluctuations (which have a
severe impact on the isolation) our
adaptation algorithms track the
antenna impedance in real time, and
tests have demonstrated that
performance can be maintained across
a range of dynamic environments,
including interaction with the
user’s hand, and in high-speed car and
rail travel.
Furthermore, to overcome the
limited matching of the antenna in the
frequency domain, and thereby
increase the bandwidth and the total
isolation, we combine the electrical
balance duplexer with further stages
of active SI cancellation, using a
second transmitter to generate a
cancellation signal to further suppress
self-interference (see figure 2).
Results from our testbed are
promising, with the active technique
providing substantial increases in
transmit-to-receive isolation when
combined with the EBD, as shown in
figure 3.
Our latest lab setup incorporates
low-cost mobile device components
(handset power amplifiers and
antennas), making it representative of a
handset implementation. Furthermore,
our measurements show that this type
of two-stage, self-interference
cancellation can achieve the required
duplex isolation in both the uplink and
downlink band, even when using low-
cost commercial grade hardware.
CONCLUSIONS
The ever-increasing demand for
high data-rate mobile services
A cellular device at
maximum range needs to
receive a signal power 12
orders of magnitude lower
than it transmits. In time
division duplexing (TDD), the
duplexing circuit is simply a
switch which connects the
antenna to either the
transmitter or the receiver
so the duplexer in TDD is a
trivial switch. In FDD, where
the transmitter and receiver
operate simultaneously, the
duplexer uses filters to
isolate the receiver from the
high-powered transmitter
signal.
Duplexers in cellular FDD
front-ends provide >~50dB
of isolation in the uplink
band, to prevent the Tx
signal from overloading the
receiver, and in the downlink
band, to prevent receiver
desensitisation due to the
out-of-band Tx emissions
which fall in the Rx band,
with minimal loss in the
transmit and receive paths.
This low loss and high
isolation requirement, at a
frequency separation of just
a few percent, requires
high-Q filtering which can
still only be implemented
using surface acoustic wave
(SAW) or bulk acoustic wave
(BAW) devices.
Whilst this technology
continues to develop, with
advances resulting largely
from the huge volumes of
these devices needed, multi-
band operation means a
separate off-chip duplexing
filter for each band, as
shown in figure A. All the
switches and routing also
add extra loss and
compromise performance.
A reasonably priced world
phone based on the current
technology would be too
hard to make. The resulting
radio architecture would be
prohibitively large, lossy,
and expensive.
Manufacturers must make
multiple product variants for
the different band
combinations needed in
various regions, and this
prevents unrestricted global
roaming on LTE. And the
scale economies that led to
GSM’s dominance get
increasingly hard to achieve.
A QUICK GUIDE
TO DUPLEXING
FILTERS
RFIC Discrete RF front-end
RF Switch
Rx LO
Rx LO
...
...
...
...
...
Separate
off-chip
PAs and
duplexers
RxIRxQTxITxQ
DACDACADCADC
x/2
x/2
Uplink
FX
FX
High powered TX Band
self-interference can
overload Rx front-end
Spurious Tx emissions in Rx
band can desensitise receiver
Power
Frequency
Duplex separation
Downlink
Low Rx insertion loss required
for Rx sensitivity
High Rx hand attenuation
in Tx path to prevent Rx
desentitisation
Low Tx insertion loss required
for Tx efficiency
High Tx hand attenuation in Rx
path to prevent Rx saturation
28002700260025002400
0
-10
-20
-30
-40
-50
-60
-70
Tx path Rx path
Insertionloss(dB)
Frequency (MHz)
Uplink band Downlink band
TxandRxspectrainanFDDsystem
The current solution – a pair of duplexing filters to filter self-
interference in the Tx and Rx path
Fig. A: Current architecture of multi-band FDD transceiver
front-end. A separate off-chip duplexer is required for each band

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17
has led to 4G mobile networks being
deployed across 50 bands, with more to
come as 5G becomes fully defined and
widely deployed. Covering all of these
using the current filter-based
technology is not feasible in one device
because of the complexity of the RF
front-end, so tunable and
reconfigurable RF circuits will be
needed.
Ideally a new approach to solving the
duplexing problem is required, which
might be based on tunable filters or
self-interference cancellation, or some
combination of the two.
Though we don’t yet have a single
approach capable of meeting the many
requirements of cost, size, performance
and efficiency, maybe the pieces of the
puzzle are coming together towards
something that could be in your pocket
not many years from now.
Techniques such as EBD with SI
cancellation may open the possibility
of using the same frequencies
simultaneously in both directions,
which could potentially give a
significant increase in spectrum
efficiency.
Maybe as we progress we won’t
speak of FDD and TDD as separate
modes but just expect that a radio will
work flexibly, switching seamlessly
from time to frequency to “division
free” duplex to suit the spectrum
available, network configuration, and
the user’s activity, moment to moment.
One observation we can make based
on this work is that such advances are
only possible by taking a holistic
approach to the system.
Ideally, the standards’ design needs
to take more account of RF hardware
issues; and product design has to
combine novel circuit approaches with
digital and analogue signal processing
and software control.
The industry today has divided the
system into conceptual black boxes,
each with its defined inputs and outputs
and performance parameters and
generally tackled by a different design
team.
This constrains thinking and
inhibits innovation. The industry of
tomorrow needs to reinvent itself.
And the radio.
Antenna reflection coefficient and balancing
reflection coefficient trajectories do not match
perfectly across the band of interest
Resulting isolation
is band limited
Tx chain
Rx chain
Tx chain Z bal
Z Ant
180°0°
0° 0°
TX Signal
RX Signal
Cancellation Signal
Frequency (GHz)
0
20
40
60
80
100
1.9 1.9251.8751.85
EB + active,
Isolation
= 81.5dB
EB only isolation = 35.8dB
DR LEO LAUGHLIN
Research Fellow, Communications Systems &
Networks Laboratory, University of Bristol
Leo Laughlin holds an M.Eng. in Electronic
Engineering from the University of York and a
Ph.D in Communications Engineering from the
University of Bristol. He has worked on Physical
Layer DSP for GSM at Qualcomm and
geolocation at Omnisense. He is a Research
Fellow at Bristol University’s Communications
Systems and Networks Laboratory.Systems and Networks Laboratory.
Fig.1. The antenna reflection coefficient and
balancing reflection coefficient trajectories on the
Smith Chart, and the resulting band limited
Fig.2. The antenna reflection coefficient and
balancing reflection coefficient trajectories on the
Smith Chart, and the resulting band limit isolation
Fig.3. Measured performance of the
electrical balance duplexer with and without
the second stage of active cancellation
SCAN
TO
TWEET
The author would like to thank his colleagues
Prof. Mark Beach, Dr. Kevin Morris, Jack
Zhang and Prof. John Haine at Bristol
University for their cooperation in the research
leading to this article, and to the University,
EPSRC, and u-blox AG for supporting the
work. Thanks also go to many colleagues in
u-blox Melbourn and Cork for their support.
1. 3GPP, “Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); User
Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception,” 2017, no. 36.101
v14.3.0.
2. S. Caporal Del Barrio, A. Tatomirescu, G. F. Pedersen, and A.
Morris, “Novel Architecture for LTE World-Phones,” IEEE Antennas
Wirel. Propag. Lett., vol. 12, pp. 1676–1679, 2013.
3. P. Bahramzy, P. Olesen, P. Madsen, J. Bojer, S. Barrio, A. Tatomirescu,
P. Bundgaard, A. S. Morris III, and G. F. Pedersen, “A Tunable RF
Front-End With Narrowband Antennas for Mobile Devices,” IEEE
Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 63, no. 10, pp. 3300–3310, Oct.
2015.
4. “Communications News: Plessey Breaks New Ground,” Electron.
Power, vol. 24, no. 10, p. 715, 1978.
5. C. K. Richardson, “Improvements in or relating to transmitters/
receivers,” UK Patent, GB1577514, 1980.
6. S. Rockman, “New radio tech could HALVE mobe operators’
bandwidth needs,” The Register. Feb 2014. http://www.theregister.
co.uk/2014/02/27/mwc2014_kuma_networks_mobile_tech_
halves_bandwidth/.
7. Geoff Carey (Mimotech), “Air Division Duplexing doubles
Transmission Capacity for Microwave Backhaul.” Presented to the
CW Radio Technology SIG, July 2015, Bristol, U.K. https://www.
mimotechnology.com/p_microwave_carrier_ethernet.htm.
8. D. Bharadia, E. McMilin, and S. Katti, “Full Duplex Radios,” in Proc.
2013 ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
9. S. Chen, M. A. Beach, and J. P. McGeehan, “Division-free duplex for
wireless applications,” Electron. Lett., vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 147–148,
1998.
10. A. Sabharwal, P. Schniter, D. Guo, D. W. Bliss, S. Rangarajan, and R.
Wichman, “In-Band Full-Duplex Wireless: Challenges and
Opportunities,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 32, no. 9, pp. 1637–
1652, Sep. 2014.
11. M. Mikhemar, H. Darabi, and A. A. Abidi, “A Multiband RF Antenna
Duplexer on CMOS: Design and Performance,” Solid-State Circuits,
IEEE J., vol. 48, no. 9, pp. 2067–2077, 2013.
12. S. H. Abdelhalem, P. S. Gudem, and L. E. Larson, “ H y b r i d
Transformer-Based Tunable Differential Duplexer in a 90-nm
CMOS Process,” Microw. Theory Tech. IEEE Trans., vol. 61, no. 3,
pp. 1316–1326, 2013.
13. L. Laughlin, M. A. Beach, K. A. Morris, and J. L. Haine, “Optimum
Single Antenna Full Duplex Using Hybrid Junctions,” IEEE J. Sel.
Areas Commun., vol. 32, no. 9, pp. 1653–1661, Sep. 2014.
14. B. van Liempd, B. Hershberg, S. Ariumi, K. Raczkowski, K.-F. Bink, U.
Karthaus, E. Martens, P. Wambacq, and J. Craninckx, “A +70-dBm
IIP3 Electrical-Balance Duplexer for Highly Integrated Tunable
Front-Ends,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., pp. 1–13, 2016.
15. L. Laughlin, C. Zhang, M. A. Beach, K. A. Morris, and J. L. Haine,
“Passive and Active Electrical Balance Duplexers,” IEEE Trans.
Circuits Syst. II Express Briefs, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 94–98, Jan. 2016.
16. L. Laughlin, M. A. Beach, K. A. Morris, and J. L. Haine, “Electrical
balance duplexing for small form factor realization of in-band full
duplex,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 102–110, May 2015.
17. G. A. Campbell and R. M. Foster, “Maximum Output Networks for
Telephone Substation and Repeater Circuits,” Am. Inst. Electr. Eng.
Trans., vol. XXXIX, no. 1, pp. 231–290, 1920.
18. D. R. DeReus, S. Natarajan, S. J. Cunningham, and A. S. Morris,
“Tunable capacitor series/shunt design for integrated tunable
wireless front end applications,” in 2011 IEEE 24th International
Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, 2011, pp. 805–
808.
1.84
20
30
40
50
60
1.86 1.88 1.92 1.94 1.96
Tx-RxIsolation(dB)
1.90
Frequency (GHz)

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19
It’s the IoT’s enormous data collection potential – and not just its ability to connect
billions of devices for the sake of it – that will drive its development
THE INTERNET OF THINGS:
DOUBLING DOWN ON THE DATA
S
O JUST HOW BIG WILL
the Internet of Things
be? Well, if you believe
the hype, the answer is
mind-bogglingly large.
Ericsson set the bar high way back in
2010 when it predicted 50 billion
connected devices within 10 years.
Since then, estimates from analysts
have reached trillions, thanks to the
work of interested companies and an
intensifying technological arms race.
Investment has poured into startups
and crowdfunded campaigns where
everyone assumes they’re going to be
an integral part of an all-singing, all-
dancing connected ecosystem, giving
us IoT capabilities in products as
diverse as hairbrushes, fridges, cat
litter trays, door locks and skis.
This has been both a boon and a
bane, with almost every new piece of
technology now being designated as
“smart”. We’re at risk of IoT fluff
(food-ordering fridges) obscuring its
huge potential benefits (detailed data
sets, power saving). If that happens, it’s
easy to imagine investors losing
confidence and turning their
backs on the whole concept.
KWANCHAIFT

20
2
It’s important to remember that the
IoT is not just about making a
connection to a device, but about
collecting data, and then turning that
data into useful information.
Once you have enough data, you
can start to analyse it to discover
valuable insights (for example, spotting
consumer behaviour trends as they
begin). Therein lies the big hope.
And as the quantity and range of
data and applications grows, the hope
is that the whole process becomes a
self-fulfilling virtuous circle, with more
data offering more opportunities for
analysis, which then prompts the
development of more applications,
which can then be placed within more
devices.
Meanwhile, the expected endgame
for the consumer IoT (with its remotely
controlled thermostats and lights) is
quite different, where the focus
remains having an app for an
TODAY’S IOT DEVICES
HAVE GIVEN US A
DEMOGRAPHIC WHICH
IS A MILE WIDE AND
AN INCH DEEP’
A BRIEF HISTORY OF IOT
1970s First connected products
using land-line phones
1980s Beginning of telemetry
using PMR
1990 Analogue cellular systems
begin to emerge
1994 GSM data and SMS enable a wider
connected device market
1997 British Gas rolls out 5,000
connected laptops for service engineers
– the world’s largest commercial
deployment at that time
2000 First GPRS network offers IP
connectivity and starts the M2M market
2010 Ericsson predict 50 billion
connected devices by 2020
2011 IoT replaces M2M, as Gartner
adds it to its Hype Cycle
2012 Smartphone apps using Wi-Fi
and Bluetooth start the consumer market
2013 Operators start to retire their
GPRS networks with no obvious
replacement
2014 SigFox and LoRA emerge as
LPWAN contenders
2016 3GPP publishes NB-IOT standard
evermore questionable range of
consumer goods.
IT’S NOT JUST A HI-TECH BRAND
LOYALTY CARD
Many manufacturers are rushing into
the IoT with little appreciation of the
wider data issues. Instead, they see the
entire concept as a type of
technologically advanced brand
loyalty card, immediately interacting
with the consumer once a purchase is
made, and allowing shopping
experiences to be personalised (with a
message sent to a consumer’s
smartphone or popping up in the
bottom corner of a TV).
So, what is the ‘real’ IoT, and how
do we get to it? Although the value in
this technological space will come
from data collection and analysis
(initially at least), the biggest hurdle we
still face is actually making secure and
stable wireless connections between
SAMSUNG,AMAZON,NEST
SMARTER DATA
More and more white
and brown goods have
a network connection
nowadays. But the
true business
opportunities lie in the
data that will be
accumulated, not the
sale of such items like
Internet-enabled
fridges.

21
NICK HUNN
CTO WiFore
Nick Hunn is the CTO of WiFore Consulting, a
leading consultancy in the wireless technologies
space, in particular M2M, smart energy,
wearables and mHealth. He is also a SIG
Champion for the CW Connected Devices
group. Nick is currently working on the next
generation audio standard for Bluetooth as well
as advising companies on
their IoT strategy.
SCAN
TO
TWEET
devices and networks.
Despite estimates from the
established players in cellular
technology of billions of wireless
connections in the very near future,
they’ve rather let the side down by
failing to deploy a convincing, low-
cost alternative to the 2G networks
they’re retiring. These of course form
the basis of most current IoT products.
That’s opened the field for a host of
alternative, short-range, low-power
wireless options (such as 802.11x
Bluetooth or ZigBee) to stake a claim
as the industry standard. It’s also
provided the opportunity for a tranche
of proprietary LPWAN offerings
(notably LoRA, SigFox and Ingenu) to
directly challenge the cellular
orthodoxy. All are currently jockeying
to become the IoT connection system
of choice. The problem is that this just
builds in another decision point for
developers, which adds delay. This
will not help the IoT reach scale.
The IoT will be global, which
means that manufacturers need to
choose a connectivity option which is
also global. As the current
connectivity battle is happening along
local lines, many manufacturers have
decided to wait until there is an
obvious winner.
THE CHALLENGE IS PROVISIONING,
NOT CONNECTION
Ironically, for larger scale deployments
the type of connection is not the major
obstacle – provisioning is. If you look
at the challenges of inserting SIMs
into billions of phones and devices,
and then carefully configuring them,
it’s simply not scalable.
It’s a process which relies on
consumers investing significant
amounts of their personal time to
make it work. If it’s to go mainstream,
the IoT needs devices which work
automatically the first time they’re
turned on, and which can be managed
for a number of years through cloud-
based services.
Unfortunately, the connectivity war
is diverting attention from the
challenge of provisioning. The
constant announcement of new
connection options, and the resulting
price war, plays straight into the hands
of startups who just want to add
connectivity to consumer products,
with no idea of the IoT’s real value.
But, these products appeal to a very
limited demographic, giving us an IoT
which is a mile wide and an inch high.
The rapid product cycle also gives
little time for end-to-end integration
or any consideration of data analytics.
Time-to-market pressure means many
of these products are built on
platforms such as the Raspberry Pi:
great for hobbyists and school pupils,
and of the 14 million sold to date
probably only a small percentage are
IoT products.
IT’S NOT ABOUT SHINY CONSUMER
PRODUCTS
This is not the way to achieve market
volume and acceptance. Those
wanting to turn the IoT into an
everyday, usable reality need to turn
their focus from products to business
models, where they can concentrate
on the value of data.
The explosion of new connectivity
options in the form of (among others)
Sigfox, LoRa, LTE-M, and NB-IOT
should be viewed as a distraction.
Industry, and particularly vertical
sectors (agriculture, cities or transport),
need to work out a way to make the
IoT work for them.
The IoT is not about shiny
consumer products but millions of
cheap sensors, providing a volume of
daily data that lets us extract
marketing and sales value that we’re
not even currently aware of.
Unless we concentrate on making
the IoT big, it will never be big enough
to succeed. To get there, we need to
focus far into the future, not on the
transience gizmos which will only
distract us from understanding the
bigger picture.
NESTING TIMES
The first generation
Nest thermostat was
released in October
2011. Now part of
Google, one of the pre-
eminent data mining
organisations, the
third generation device
uses machine learning
to understand its
users habits.

22
2
maximum throughput of 10kb/s but
may have a limited window of
opportunity as the sun is beginning to
set on 2G.
UNLICENSED TRAIL-BLAZERS
The trail-blazers operate in unlicensed
spectrum – 868MHz in Europe.
Sigfox was designed for apps that
required short bursts of data, typically
up to 12 bytes, a few times a day.
Downlink transmissions are limited
to a few packets per day which
effectively rules out over-the-air
updates (for security credentials, for
example) to Sigfox IoT devices.
As a spread-spectrum technology,
LoRaWAN benefits from better
interference immunity compared with
Sigfox and is optimised for occasional
messages of a few tens of bits.
LoRaWAN can be deployed on a
DIY basis: anyone can buy their own
base station. Many base station
operators are joining crowd-sourced
networks such as The Things Network.
Other DIY options include IEEE
802.15.4 and Bluetooth Long Range,
which with a claimed range of 2-3km
(line of sight) will be part of Bluetooth
v5.x.
Nick Hunn of WiFore Consulting
outlined some imperatives for a
successful LPWAN IoT value-chain:
low-cost hardware and modules, simple
provisioning, up-front data plans, and
connectivity options that work globally
with no reconfiguration.
He observed that while there are
now four technologies that claim to
offer battery lives of ten years, there is a
question as to whether any of the
networks will last ten years!
He counselled delegates not to get
hung up on technology choices, but to
deploy devices and start collecting
data. “Choosing your low-power WAN
isn’t the stumbling block. Just go and
do it,” he said.
Hunn outlined the many layers to an
IoT application and stressed the
importance of building teams and
partnerships to pull together the
required expertise.
He also noted that data cleansing
will be a major part of IoT. “If you’re
still doing your data analytics on an
Excel spreadsheet you’re probably not
quite ready for the IoT,” he warned.
Paul Green of Iotic Labs introduced
the concept of ‘Metaplatforms’ –
environments where data from many
different ‘things’ can be shared and
mashed together. He likened his
company’s Iotic Space to eBay which,
by providing some governance, creates
trust and gives people the confidence
to transact. Iotic aims to be a safe place
for people to find and exchange data
which has context.
MILLIONS NOT BILLIONS
Anthony Rix from 8power joined his
fellow CWIC organisers in a Q&A in
which they shared their views on the
IoT opportunity.
While forecasts of billions of devices
by 2020 may be a little optimistic, Rix
said, “There are thousands of niches
that could each consume millions of
devices.”
He advised delegates to identify good
business cases and target one or two
vertical markets with services specific
to their needs. “It’s important to work
out where you add value,” he
concluded.
IAN VOLANS
Managing Director, Volans Consulting Ltd.
Ian Volans heads up Volans Consulting working
on projects focused around mobile, wireless,
new media and broadcast technologies. He is
currently involved in the production of
conference programmes at IBC in Amsterdam
as well as communications strategies to support
industry associations active in LTE, IoT, mHealth
and intelligent transport systems.
SCAN
TO
TWEET
LPWAN, or Low Power Wide Area
Network, is one of the plethora of
acronyms at the heart of excited
discussions about the Internet of
Things. CW’s LPWAN CWIC-Starter
aimed to strip away the plethora of
acronyms to explain the different
options and how IoT might affect
business.
Delegates gathered at the University
of Cambridge Computer Laboratory,
which boasts its own LPWAN base
station, on Tuesday, 28th
March.
Tim Whittaker of Cambridge
Consultants, one of the four champions
of the CW Connected Devices SIG
who developed the day’s agenda,
kicked-off with a review of current
LPWA connectivity options saying,
“IoT is not a technology. It’s really
about business cases.”
BATTERIES INCLUDED
Any choice of wireless technology will
be influenced by required
communications range, the volume of
data that needs to be sent, and the
available power.
A ten-year battery life was a design
consideration for three new LPWA
connectivity options standardised in
3GPP Release-13. Mobile operators
aim to offer these in competition to
Sigfox and LoRaWAN, the early pace-
setters in this field.
LTE Cat-M1 (aka eMTC) is a
simplified form of LTE, offering up to
1Mb/s – the highest throughput of any
LPWA technology. Whittaker warned
that mobility comes at a price: “You
will not get a ten year battery life with
mobility.”
NB-IoT, which evolved partly out of
the Neul technology developed in
Cambridge, can be deployed in guard-
bands on mobile networks and can
deliver up to 144kb/s in both
directions. It is simpler and less power-
hungry than Cat-M1 but delivers the
same energy per bit.
The third 3GPP option, EC-GSM-
IoT, is an evolution of GPRS with a
CWJ reports from the LPWAN CWIC Starter event held in Cambridge where delegates debated
which LPWAN technologies should be deployed to provide the best IoT experience
THE BATTLE FOR SUPREMACY IN LPWAN IS BIG BUSINESS
as well as communications strategies to support
industry associations active in LTE, IoT, mHealth
and intelligent transport systems.

CWIC START: IS IT FINALLY TIME FOR SOME HIGH TECHNOLOGY IN
CWJ reports from the Automotive CWIC Starter event held in London earlier this year,
where attendees discussed developments in autonomy, networking and propulsion
CWJ reports from the Automotive CWIC Starter event held in London earlier this year,
where attendees discussed developments in autonomy, networking and propulsion
23
DRIVERLESS CARS COMING OUR WAY, FASTER THAN YOU THINK
TESLA
MODEL S
Elon Musk has
stated that Tesla
cars now being
built already have
the hardware
necessary to
drive themselves.
runs and mobility within large
complexes such as hospitals or
shopping centres.
Quite apart from autonomy there is
the matter of future vehicle
networking, a field which is potentially
even more complex, especially if
networking is used for safety, with the
attendant legal ramifications.
The problems of autonomous
driving could be appreciably
simplified, for instance, if every vehicle
were sharing its location, direction of
travel, speed (and perhaps, its
intentions) with other vehicles nearby.
Ships at sea already do this using the
Automatic Information System (AIS).
Such a system could have prevented
the well-known crash last year in
which a Tesla car on “Autopilot” hit a
truck crossing the road ahead.
Networking between vehicles and
traffic-control infrastructure could also
permit autonomous vehicles to tailgate
as routine at high speeds, allowing the
roads to carry much more traffic and
hugely improving fuel efficiency. This
is an idea imagined as long ago as the
1970s (Judge Dredd’s megacity of the
future had a prison placed on a traffic
island, normally escape proof due to
the continual flow of high-speed
computer controlled vehicles hurtling
around it).
It could even be that the
autonomous, networked vehicles of the
future would mean more personal cars
and journeys, not fewer. With a
personal car that could be summoned
by app, you would not need a parking
space either at work or at home to use
it for commuting. In such a case there
would be as many as six car journeys
per commuter per day rather than
just two.
At the moment, however, no vehicle
has yet been permitted onto a public
road without a human driver. The
many trials which have taken place
have all had human “safety drivers”,
usually required for practical purposes
and always for legal ones – as Stephen
Hamilton, partner at event sponsor
Mills & Reeve, reminded us.
The technology will be there: indeed,
in many cases it is already there.
It isn’t clear when it will be allowed to
reach its full potential, however.
LEWIS PAGE
Editor, Cambridge Wireless Journal
Lewis Page has been a technology journalist and
writer for over a decade. Before becoming
editor of CWJ he was the editor of (in)famous
tech tabloid website The Register. He has also
written for the Guardian, the Telegraph,
Prospect magazine and many others.
He has a degree in engineering
from Cambridge University.
SCAN
TO
TWEET
ALMOST EVERYONE involved in
the automotive, transport and mobility
sectors believes that significant
technology-driven change is coming.
Both established vehicle manufacturers
and new entrants such as Google and
Tesla have many projects underway,
not only aimed at autonomous or
“driverless” cars but also exploring the
various concepts grouped under the
banner of Mobility as a Service
(MaaS).
These concepts were discussed at
the CWIC Starter Transport and
Mobility event on 23rd
March 2017.
All the major stakeholders were there:
car makers, autonomous systems
developers, telematics and traffic
analysts, shared and hire-car services,
the insurance industry and naturally –
given that this subject will hinge so
much on future regulations – lawyers.
Many interesting concepts were
brought up. Julian Turner of Westfield
Sportscars, a company famous for
offerings such as the GTM (very much
drivers’ cars) was very enthusiastic
about the possibilities which autonomy
and networking could unleash for
vehicle
manufacturers.
Westfield is
developing the
concept of driverless
“pods” useful for
“last mile” tasks
such as home
deliveries, school
TESLA

24
T
HE RECENT
Cambridge Wireless
International
Conference (CWIC)
2017 revealed that
despite the commonly
held perception that the older and
younger generations are in conflict,
technology offers a way to bring
together people of all ages
The ninth Cambridge Wireless
International Conference was held on
Wednesday, 7th
June at the impressive
Wellcome Genome Campus
Conference Centre. It was exciting to
see so many distinguished industry
figures gathered together for thought-
provoking presentations and
discussions, organised around the
overarching 2017 CWIC theme of
‘Connecting Generations’.
The day started off with welcomes
from CW Chairman Raj Gawera (VP
and Managing Director of Samsung
Cambridge and Samsung Aalborg),
CWIC committee chairman Simon
Fletcher (CTO Real Wireless), and Ian
Simmons from the event’s platinum
sponsor, Magna. An innovation this
year was the post of Master of
Ceremonies, ably filled by Nick Hunn
of WiFore Consulting and the
Connected Devices Special Interest
Group (SIG).
The keynote discussion on
Connecting Generations followed.
With numerous points of general
disagreement between the UK’s older
and younger generations – Brexit
springs to mind, as does the costs of
health and social care, and don’t forget
house prices – the theme explored ways
to alleviate the associated issues and
bringing together groups of people.
One solution often considered
relevant to the fields of medical and
social care is the Internet of Things
(IoT). Robert Milner of Cambridge
Consultants, however, took the view
that the IoT cannot truly take off
without a technology option which is
cheaper than today’s Bluetooth and
more capable than offerings such as
RFID.
The ultra-low-cost devices he
discussed could enable huge numbers
CWIC REPORT
BRIDGING THE
GENERATIONAL
DIVIDE: COULD
TECHNOLOGICAL
ADVANCES
HOLD THE KEY?

25
of applications. For example,
individual drug doses might be tracked
right to the point of use, allowing
everyone from logistics managers to
physicians to elderly patients to better
manage their requirements.
Cambridge Consultants’ view is that
such devices are feasible by shrinking
the area currently occupied by
analogue radio components, so
reducing chip size and cost.
Priya Prakash, of Design For Social
Change (D4SC), argued that many
technology offerings are solutions
without problems, and put forward this
suggestion for the industry: “Let’s learn
to love our problems, not the
solutions.”
Prakash added that as well as
traditional STEM subjects and
training, industry and government
need to value artistic and design
ability, as it is these which very often
lead to the mass adoption of
technologies. This is a theme
sometimes given the acronym
STEAM, for Science, Technology,
Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.
William Beech of Deloitte supported
this view, pointing out that the
demographic with the highest
percentage of iPad use in the UK is, in
fact, older people.
INNOVATION AND THE RISE OF 3D
Next, we heard from newly-joined CW
member and CWIC Pod Sponsor RS
Components, a firm evidently well
known to many in the audience, as a
show of hands revealed that most of
those present had previously ordered
items from RS.
Pete Wood, Head Technology
Evangelist for RS, talked us through
the company’s DesignSpark resource,
which provides free design tools, data,
and a community exchange of
information to help engineers
worldwide turn their ideas into reality.
At this point the conference diverged
into two tracks. One group of
attendees was treated to an update
from the world of ‘mixed reality’, or
MR, the favoured term now for ideas
that might formerly have been found
under the banners of ‘virtual’ or
‘augmented’ reality.
Track chair Carl
Smith, of digital
media and design
college
Ravensbourne,
raised the almost
visionary
possibilities of using
MR to “change
significantly the way we live” by
“hacking the brain” and adding new
sensory abilities to the human race.
Or, to put it a little more prosaically, by
editing out unwanted inputs such as
the noise of snoring.
One area where immersive and MR
technologies already command
significant interest is the music
industry. Muki Kulhan, late of MTV
and The Voice, gave an illuminating
talk on this subject. Appropriately
enough, the platinum-selling “virtual
band” Gorillaz (whose members are
fictional) currently holds the record for
the biggest VR debut on YouTube with
its offering Saturnz Barz. Kulhan did
however note that five times as many
people watched the non-VR version.
James E Marks, of 3D technology
provider DoubleMe, went a step
further: suggesting that MR could be
radically consciousness-altering – with
the possibility that it could allow users
to experience other people’s lives with
such fidelity as to raise the possibility
of an Airbnb of bodies”.
Edward Miller of Scape
Technologies pointed out that MR is
very much already here in commercial
terms, referencing 2016’s Pokémon Go
phenomenon and pointing out that this
was not only enormously lucrative, but
has also helped combat autism among
its users.
Oliver Kibblewhite of REWIND
possibly topped all those who had gone
before him by asserting that “MR is
the most important advancement since
the invention of fire”.
LPWAN – WHO WILL WIN IN IOT?
Low Power Wide Area Networks
(LPWAN) track chair Nick Hunn
opened his remarks with the assertion
that shutting down the GPRS system
has taken out the obvious route for IoT
and led to a proliferation of standards.
Tony Sammut of Vodafone R&D
pointed out that Vodafone is the
world’s largest IoT connecting
company, and will keep 2G even after
3G is turned off for just this reason.
Tony also described the Exalted IoT
LTE project, which led (via a
Vodafone-convened Industry Special
Interest Group) to proposals into 3GPP
that resulted in the NB-IoT standard
being defined in record time.
Ian Stewart of Arqiva
KEYNOTE
PANEL
Stephen Fletcher
debates with
the Connecting
Generations
panel (l-r), Robert
Milner, William
Beech, Priya
Prakesh

26
provoking talk from Rachel Skinner of
WSP, an engineering services
consultancy, who was looking at
transport issues from the point of view
of a civil (rather than electronic)
engineer. She highlighted the four key
technology attributes of the coming
generation of vehicles as being
Autonomous/Driverless, Shared,
Connected and Electric (or low-
carbon, anyway).
She pointed out that today’s
privately-owned cars spend 90 per cent
or more of their time parked, are not
efficient users of space, and future fully
networked and autonomous vehicles
could multiply the effective capacity of
the roads by a factor close to four.
“The best solution may not be market
led,” she speculated.
Much of the discussion around
connected and autonomous vehicles
revolves around the idea of Level 5
autonomy – that is, cars which do not
require a driver at all. Such cars might
in fact lead to a rise (not a fall) in
private ownership and car journeys, as
urban apartment dwellers or office
workers without access to parking
could send them off to park far away
when not using them and summon
them back at will.
Tesla’s Elon Musk recently
speculated that future AV owners
would choose to send their cars out to
earn money as taxis, too.
Ian Simmons of Magna, however,
suggested that Level 5 autonomy is
“many years away”. Stephen
Hamilton, of law firm Mills & Reeve,
took umbrage at the media’s obsession
with the “trolley problem” as it affects
AV programming – should an AV be
programmed to sacrifice its
passengers, or a small group of
pedestrians, if this would result in
saving a larger group of people from
death or injury?
Stephen pointed out that this is not
an issue which the law makes much of
when it comes to human drivers, who
are not criticised following accidents
for failing to make choices of this sort
“correctly” (though they may well be
for getting into such a situation
unnecessarily).
described the Sigfox network, which is
looking to scale deployments at
industry or national level. The
opportunity, in his view, is less about
the connection technology and more
about the business relationships. The
coming IoT landscape plays into
companies moving from being product
centric to being software and service
centric.
Businesses, Arqiva believes, will
have to partner to do this and this
means adopting a business model
where they share revenue. The
winners will be many and varied.
THE NECESSITY (OR NOT) OF
GIGABIT CONNECTIONS
At this point it was time for the
flagship debate of the conference, with
the proposition “5G needs to be
planned today on the basis that
tomorrow’s society will need Gigabit
connectivity”. Speaking for the
proposition was Stephen Temple of the
Surrey University 5G IC. Arguing
against was William Webb of the
Weightless SIG.
Temple began by asserting that
today we have a unique window of
opportunity, with the major industrial
players, the UK government, and
various European governments all
ready to sit down and establish a
roadmap which will lead to the
infrastructure needed in a decade’s
time.
Not since the early generations of
mobile technology, he argued, has the
UK government’s position been so
positive, matters having hugely
improved since the primarily revenue-
focused 3G spectrum auctions.
However, he did say that the
investment needed to achieve Gigabit
5G would be “very, very high” and
that this “is not going to be a matter of
four competing networks … this is
going to have to be done a different
way”.
He summed up his remarks by
raising the possibility of “unknown
unknowns”, which would require far
more capacity than the applications
known or forecast today.
Webb built his argument against the
proposition by
asking the audience
whether they would
rather have ten-
megabit connectivity
that worked reliably
everywhere, or
Gigabit connectivity
but only in those
areas where there is
3G coverage today.
He pointed out that high data rates
inevitably mean high frequencies,
which in turn means shorter range,
less coverage and greater expense.
One interesting idea that arose
during the lively Q&A was that of 5G
being an umbrella term, rather than
an extension of existing technologies.
It could be viewed as a “system of
systems” that will bring flexibility to
mobile, fixed, and broadband
networks (and support ever larger data
requirements). In that case, Gigabit
connectivity is only one aspect of the
5G story, and can’t be the basis of an
overall 5G plan.
In the end, when debate chair Mike
Short (VP, Telefonica) called for a
show of hands he declared a “marginal
victory” for Webb, and it became clear
that the CWIC delegates did not agree
that 5G should be planned based upon
society needing Gigabit connectivity.
KING OF THE LOW-CARBON ROAD
The conference then split into tracks
again. Those attending the Transport
and Mobility track heard a thought-
THE 5G
DEBATE
Stephen Temple
argues that 5G
needs to be
planned today on
the basis that
consumers will
want Gigabit
connectivity

27
reinforcement learning?
Noel Hurley of ARM essentially
answered “yes”, pointing out that it
took until this year to ship the first 100
billion ARM chips, while the next 100
billion are expected to move by 2021.
POWERFUL, AND POWER HUNGRY
“Machine learning drives up the
compute requirement,” he suggested,
adding that MR and edge clouds
would also be important factors. But
he did also stress that there is an
energy problem ahead for AI systems,
at least for mobile ones.
“It takes the equivalent of 62
lithium-ion batteries to power a
human brain for a day,” he noted,
before bringing up the example of one
AI machine that can reliably
outperform human brains, the
AlphaGo system.
AlphaGo’s human opponent
consumes energy equivalent to
“approximately half a Big Mac” in a
contest, during which AlphaGo
consumes energy equivalent to no less
than 3,090 Big Macs.
This suggests that AI systems which
can reliably outperform humans may
be quite energy hungry, certainly in a
mobile context.
remote facilities.
Describing the evolution of content
delivery networks (CDNs) into the
edge clouds of today, he warned that
the IoT city’s edge will be an “order of
magnitude beyond what we’ve done
before”, and suggested that the only
way it can be funded is that “we will
have to give up our data … I can’t see
how this infrastructure will get done
any other way”.
A LONG, HOT AI SUMMER AHEAD?
The second plenary was on AI, the AI
SIG having superseded the former Big
Data SIG. The speakers did point out,
however, that AI is not solely about
analysing large volumes of data.
Elon Musk, for instance, has
described it as “the future man-
machine interface”, and Peter Whale
(Founder, Peter Whale Consulting)
pointed out that many marketing
departments will simply put an “AI”
label on anything they can, with this
current trendiness referred to as an
“AI summer”.
Is this AI summer here to stay? And
could that mean the advent of “AI as a
service”, with no need to hire your
own PhDs to start reaping the benefits
of deep learning, huge data sets and
HEALTHCARE
With a strong Healthcare SIG, CW
has always enjoyed stimulating events
and the CWIC healthcare track was
chaired by Collette Johnson from
Plextek. In attendance were Gareth
Presch of World Health Innovations
Summit, Dr Robert Tansley from
Cambridge Innovation Capital and
Karen Livingstone, of the Eastern
Academic Health Science Network.
Gareth Presch explained that the
opportunity for healthcare is in the
community, through social media,
collaborating and stimulating
innovation.
Dr Robert Tansley argued that VC
has been a poor custodian of
technology in the UK. He believes
there is scope for a suite of apps to
replace a lot of the work GPs do: this
will be evolution not revolution, and
not one app but several.
Karen Livingstone’s Eastern
Academic Health Science Network
forms part of a large set of networks
which work together throughout the
NHS to fund and work with
developers, bringing innovations to the
bedside or home.
The opportunities Livingstone sees
as most interesting are for imaging and
machine learning, as a way to improve
diagnosis, and the NHS is already
funding chatbots to use AI for these
very things. As for the biggest
challenges for the NHS, these are
mental health and chronic care,
argued Livingstone.
THE EDGE CLOUD COMES CENTRE
STAGE
The first plenary session of the day was
on “The Intelligent City”. Matthew
Larbey of EdgeConneX argued that
in the IoT cities of the future, with
huge amounts of data being generated,
it will be impossible to handle
processing in traditional cloud fashion
with remote data centres.
He contended that at least 45 per
cent of the data will have to be
processed in the so-called Edge Cloud,
presenting various challenges – not
least that of energy efficiency, one of
the advantages enjoyed by large
CONCORDE WAS THE BEST
AND FASTEST THING THAT
COULD BE BUILT, BUT IT WAS
STILL THE WRONG DECISION”
WILLIAM WEBB

28
2
C
AMBRIDGE Wireless
and its members are
naturally very concerned
about developments
within the telecoms
infrastructure of the future. Many of
its features are being worked on right
now under the aegis of the Telecom
Infra Project (TIP), an engineering-
focused initiative supported by many
of the biggest names in the business.
“A lot of forums work with operators
or vendors,” says Mansoor Hanif,
Director of BT’s Converged Networks
Lab. “Not many also work with web-
scale organisations and small startups
like this. It’s something quite new.”
The TIP membership includes CW
members such as BT, Vodafone,
Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and
Telefonica, with many European telcos
joining in just the last few months. But
the originator of TIP was a rather
different firm: Facebook.
So far, the most visible example of
TIP’s technology ideas is Facebook’s
white box for optical networking,
dubbed Voyager. In Facebook’s words
it “enables a clean separation of
software and hardware”. Voyager has
been tested on fibre networks in the
US and Europe, including a trial in
March on Telia Carrier’s Stockholm to
Hamburg route. Orange has also
announced that it will work with
Facebook to examine Voyager.
VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
At the Mobile World Congress in
February 2017, Facebook’s Vice
President of Engineering, Jay Parikh
said: “The Voyager box has a lot of
interest. Major telcos are doing trials
and planning deployments in
production infrastructure. It is a more
flexible design [and] an operator can
customize it and use it in different ways
with their infrastructure.”
Following the huge impact of
Facebook’s Open Compute Project
and white box
solutions in the data
centre, many
analysts expect that
TIP and open
systems like Voyager
will have similar
consequences in
networks. It’s a
certainty that some
members of both
TIP and CW who have traditionally
provided integrated hardware-and-
software solutions for networking, such
as Cisco, will be monitoring
developments closely. But operators, at
least, don’t believe that Facebook
wants to be a telco.
OPTICAL NETWORKING: THE TIP OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE ICEBERG
Facebook’s Telecom Infra Project set to redraw the technology map of the world. Are you ready?
MANSOOR
HANIF
In the search for
mobile solutions
for remote areas
in the UK, we met
with Facebook
and realised we
could work better
together via TIP

29
“Yes, a few years back the big web-
scale clouds were building networks,”
says BT’s Hanif. “You had Facebook’s
Aquila, Google’s Loon, and so on.”
With Aquila, Facebook is seeking to
develop lightweight, solar powered
unmanned aircraft that could remain
aloft for months or
years, and provide
wireless coverage
across wide areas at
much less cost than
satellites. It’s an idea
seen as potentially
very useful for
connecting remote
areas, though one
might note that
several solar high-
altitude projects have been undertaken
since the 1970s and there are still
serious problems to be solved with the
aircraft technology. Under Project
Loon, Google has sought to provide
similar capabilities with balloons,
steered to some degree by varying
their altitude so as to obtain a
favourable wind.
ACCELERATING THE PROCESS
“That wasn’t competition with
operators,” explains Hanif, who was
working for EE, at that point separate
from BT. “It did raise curiosity. At the
same time I was trying to find mobile
solutions for remote areas in the UK,
so this was interesting. I met with
Facebook a couple of years ago and we
realised we could work better together.
“We don’t believe that it wants to
become an operator. There’s a
common goal of having much more
efficient infrastructure.”
One of the ways that Facebook, BT
and the rest of the TIP alliance aim to
achieve this is by building a worldwide
network of TIP Ecosystem
Acceleration Centres (TEACs).
These are intended to provide
backing and assistance for startups
which could move infrastructure
technology forward, hosted by major
operators.
“Facebook and others have been
doing this in software,” explains
Hanif. “Investment generally has
tended to be in customer-facing
technology, with very little going to
infrastructure. It’s difficult to get a
clear route to market for this.”
To change that situation, BT is
selecting interesting startups with
promising new ideas for building
infrastructure. These will receive
mentoring and support at its famous
Adastral Park R&D centre in Ipswich,
and London’s Tech City. There will
also be investment available.
“Venture capitalists have pledged
£170 million in London,” says Hanif.
“We have a short list of 12-13 startups
and we are expanding that until mid
July. We’ll be receiving suggestions
from VCs and also from organisations
such as Cambridge Wireless.”
“The aim is to select to 10 or 12,
then in September we’ll arrange a jury.
Each finalist will pitch and from them
we’ll select two or three to put into the
TEAC from September.”
Apart from the BT-led TEAC in the
UK, Orange is also setting one up in
France and SKT is leading another in
Seoul.
“It’s an excellent alternative route to
accelerate innovation,” according to
Hanif. “We still like standards bodies,
but TIP will be good in areas where
standards have less effect.”
The British TEAC will be seeking
out startups working in network
infrastructure relevant technologies.
Candidates will need to be formally
incorporated, and Hanif anticipates
that most of the finalists will have 40
employees or fewer.
Particular areas of interest include
quantum networking, mission-critical
business connectivity, and AI
applications for infrastructure.
“We’re also interested in
programmable radio networks,” says
Hanif. “We’re partnering with Lime
Microsystems to select companies and
offered free dev kits to universities.
Any company can ask for those, too.”
It looks as though new technologies
emerging from the TIP will play a
large part in drawing a new network
map of the world,
with very significant
challenges and
opportunities arising
from it. It’s evidently
an initiative that all
CW Journal readers
should be watching
closely.
JAY PARIKH
We’re working
with EE to pilot a
4G solution that
overcomes the
challenges of the
Scottish
Highlands to
connect remote
communities
BOXING
CLEVER
Voyager is a
networking
solution for Open
Packet DWDM
networks and the
first ‘white box’
transponder and
routing solution
SCAN
TO
TWEET
BT/FACEBOOK

30
2
wide-ranging talk, we heard about new
attacks on physical assets, intellectual
property and business practices. I was
particularly interested to hear how
targeted emails (“spear phishing”
attacks) are starting to use artificial
intelligence to automate messages
using natural language and small
truths gleaned from the public-domain
to win the reader’s confidence ahead of
a malicious call to action.
GOVERNMENT RESPONSE
Crime is a law and
order problem, and
governments can
mitigate the effects with
new regulations, backed up by robust
policing. It was great to hear from the
Met’s Tim Court about successful
investigations and prosecutions for
cyber fraud. He moved the agenda
beyond technology, with a
philosophical aside about the
psychology of crime: crime is a people
issue, and it stops when individual
criminals start to fear the impact of
enforcement and choose legal ways to
make their money.
INNOVATE FASTER
The nature of IT fraud
is essentially
asymmetric, with
complete coverage
required for defence, but a small
weakness being a sufficient to allow
entry. Is the answer to increase the
pace of innovation and to respond to
threats more quickly? Fraser Kyne of
Bromium talked us through the
categories of recent end-point attacks,
including browser vulnerabilities,
ransomware, and a growing awareness
of kernel exploits. He argued for
defence in depth, using his own
company’s product as an example of
micro-scale segmentation to contain
security risks.
MARKET FORCES
If security has a
business value and an
associated cost, will the
market place work itself
out? Nick Kingsbury is a venture
capitalist with Kingsbury Ventures,
and he guided us through a set of key
questions for the board of directors of
any company. He wanted to hear
answers about the business impact of
a security breach; the risk posed by
third-party suppliers; and critically
about the strength of the relationship
between the Chief Information
Security Officer and the board. I was
struck by his point that traditional
business practices require independent
experts to audit financial accounts, but
there’s no formal requirement to audit
the processes used to secure a
company’s intellectual property assets.
FINALLY
The final presentation was The Home
Office’s Jane Cannon, talking about
her plans to establish a Cambridge
office to facilitate the relationship
between UK government and
commercial solution providers, the
Joint Security and Resilience Centre.
And we wrapped up with an open
floor discussion of topics raised during
the day. What’s next for the Security
SIG? Well, we’d like to hear from you
about your agenda for security.
SECURITY SIG
TACKLING CYBER
CRIME: FOUR
APPROACHES
EXAMINED
TIM PHIPPS
Product Manager for Security, Solarflare
Tim Phipps is Product Manager for security at
Solarflare, which scales and accelerates data
centre communications. He has helped
companies to develop new technologies
including cellular communications at TTPCom,
WiFi/Bluetooth at Symbionics, and bespoke
solutions at Plextek.
SCAN
TO
TWEET
THE SECURITY SIG
likes to start with an
unconventional view of
world, and use that to
form an agenda which
is nothing like those
predictable talking
shops that you’ll have
attended this year. In
planning our recent
event we considered the
macroeconomic trends in the crime
industry. Our hypothesis was that
recessionary pressures should lead to
consolidation and, ultimately, to
disruptive innovation. Did it happen
that way?
We looked at four types of response
to market change, to see which
strategy was most likely to succeed in
countering cyber crime innovation.
TRUST IN ESTABLISHED
PRACTICES
The most popular
business strategy for
dealing with any
disruptive change is
denial. So, we invited Dave Palmer of
Darktrace to bring us news from the
frontline of the cyber security wars and
shake our complacency with tales of
how quickly the threat is evolving. In a
5,583,000CYBER CRIME & FRAUDWASANEW
ADDITIONTOTHE UK CRIME SURVEYAND
CAME INWITHAWHOPPING NUMBER OF
ESTIMATED INCIDENTS IN 2016
1
3
2
4

INTRODUCING
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The Bluetooth®
wordmark and logos are registered trademarks owned by the Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of such marks by Ellisys is under license.
Wi-Fi®
and the Wi-Fi Alliance logo are trademarks of Wi-Fi Alliance. Other trademarks and trade names are those of their respective owners
INTRODUCING
INTRODUCING
INTRODUCING

32
2
WHAT’S THE busiest
cell site in the UK?
How did GSM come
within a hair’s breadth
of not happening? And
why is a pager better
than a mobile phone?
These were all things
which the forty or so
attendees of the
Wireless Heritage SIG learnt on their
school trip to the Science Museum.
Unusually for a Cambridge Wireless
event this was held on a Saturday,
something CW chose to allow
members to bring their children and
grandchildren and help pass on the
technological history that members
have helped create.
The event was kicked off by Rob
Morland, who in 1983 was working for
PA Consulting advising the UK
government on the potential for
mobiles. A bright future was seen, and
by 1989 one per cent (yes, one per
cent!) of the UK population would be
using cellphones.
BT, THE GREAT AND POWERFUL
The incumbent was of course BT,
which thought it
strange that anyone
else might want to
serve the British
public with
telephone services.
BT wanted to use
STD codes and
make mobile users
pay for incoming
calls. It was thought
that the two coming
mobile networks –
Securicor-Cellnet
and Racal-Vodafone
– would never be
able to cover the
whole of the UK.
So, Stephen
Temple, the engineer
and senior civil servant who played a
key role in the development of the
UK’s mobile networks, ensured
network roaming terms were made
part of the proposal to allow operation.
But he later explained to the Wireless
Heritage SIG that the idea only lasted
a few weeks.
One of the issues Rob had to
contend with while planning a UK
cellular service was BT’s control over
who or what connected to its network.
BT was still essentially analogue with
the System X digital exchanges still
pretty new. It was highly concerned
about “phone phreaks”, or people
using tones to hack the system and get
free call.
However, Rob was quietly tipped
the wink about a System X exchange
which was working with an
interconnect that BT had (up until that
point) failed to mention. That led the
way to integrating mobiles with the BT
network.
THE RISE AND RISE OF GSM
The theme which ran through the
event was the overlap of technology
and politics. None more so than
Stephen Temple’s talk on how GSM –
essentially a drive for European unity
– was born out of both.
The Germans and French were
tempted by CDMA, and at a 1987
meeting in Madrid the proposal for
GSM collapsed. Different standards in
different places had repercussions not
just for roaming but for the handset
builders’ economies of scale.
With it looking like GSM was never
going to happen, Temple engineered a
call between the UK and German
ministers and a meeting in Bonn. It
worked. It needed at least three
European markets to come online at
NOKIA 3310
Launched in
2000, the 3310
with its iconic
soap-bar styling,
Navi key, and
swappable covers
went on to sell
126M units
STRONG SIGNAL
The Rugby Tuning Coil, in
its day, played its part in
the most powerful radio
transmitter in the world
WIRELESS HERITAGE SIG
REVEALING THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE UK’S MOBILE INDUSTRY
Who’d have thought a Saturday field trip to the London Science Museum would uncover so
much intrigue and clear up some mysteries?

CW Journal, Vol 1, Issue 1

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