The future according to Qualcomm: 3 technologies for faster and more seamless connectivity

What else is Qualcomm cooking these days?

It’s become almost like clockwork. Every year around end February, hordes of journalists descend on Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC). Needless to say, the vast majority of us are there for the most hotly anticipated releases from major players like Samsung and LG. With trembling hands, bated breath, and a maniacal glint in our eye, we just cannot wait to get our so-called expert hands on the latest razor-thin handset that is - cue drum roll - even faster than last year’s model.

But jokes aside, there’s a lot going on at MWC other than the launch of the latest Samsung Galaxy S7 phones and the frequent appearances of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 SoC. The mobile world is all about connectivity. The whole point of faster and more capable devices is so that they can do more and plug us into the grid even more quickly. And considering that 4G networks began rolling out around six years ago, everyone is now clamoring for the next-generation, low-latency network that will propel us into the range of Gigabit-class speeds.

Furthermore, the prospect of 1Gbps speeds isn’t even some far off possibility. In the week leading up to MWC, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X16 modem, a Category 16, 4x4 MIMO modem that can hit up to 1Gbps download speeds (assuming the infrastructure supports it). And given the growing focus - for better or worse - on virtual reality, 4K content, and the Internet of Things (IoT), the impetus to develop and implement technologies that will enable faster wireless connections and support multiple connected devices is stronger than ever.

At MWC 2016, we got the chance to peek at some of the projects that are still in Qualcomm’s R&D pipeline. In a nutshell, if these technologies are implemented commercially, we’ll be saying hello to higher and more consistent wireless speeds and opening the door to new applications for IoT devices.

MU-MIMO in uplink

You’ve heard about 802.11ad Wi-Fi, or WiGig, but what about the 802.11ax standard? While 802.11ad operates in the high-frequency 60GHz band, which translates into shorter ranges and more difficulty working around obstacles like walls, 802.11ax transmits in the 5GHz band. That’s the same band that 802.11ac Wi-Fi operates in, so you don’t have to put up with drastically reduced range just because you need higher bandwidth and speeds.

At MWC, Qualcomm singled out the benefit of one key aspect of 802.11ax – uplink multi-user performance. Current MU-MIMO technology reduces latency by allowing an MU-MIMO router to address multiple MU-MIMO devices simultaneously, thus cutting down wait times. However, this is still mostly limited to downlink applications, and when uplink traffic increases on the part of multiple users, overall connection speeds can still suffer.

And that’s precisely where 802.11ax uplink multi-user performance hopes to improve matters. It essentially enables multiple users to simultaneously transmit to a wireless access point, thus making the handling of uplink traffic far more efficient. These efficiency gains on the uplink streams can in turn be passed on to the downlink, which can now transmit more data. So even if you had multiple members of a household uploading photos to the cloud at the same time, someone trying to download a movie would still be able to do so without experiencing a drop in performance.

In a video demo that Qualcomm showed us, one user was receiving traffic on the downlink, while four other users in close proximity with each other were transmitting at fixed rates on the uplink. All users were served by the same four-antenna access point. Without the uplink traffic, the sole user on the downlink was able to enjoy speeds over 95Mbps. But once the other users began transmitting data to the access point one at a time in single-user mode, the downlink speeds took a huge dive to under 20Mbps.

Following that, Qualcomm showed us what would happen if it enabled 802.11ax multi-user technology, which allows the access point to schedule all four uplink users simultaneously and utilize available radio resources more efficiently. Now, the downlink speeds rose appreciably to around 77Mbps, while uplink speeds remained unaffected for all users. As the number of connected devices in homes and offices is only set to grow, the advantage of being able to cope effectively with multiple users downloading and uploading data simultaneously is clear as day.

In the second scenario, Qualcomm similarly had one user receiving traffic on the downlink, but the other four users were now located at different areas in the office, which meant that they had differing signal path losses. As expected, the aggregated uplink throughput was lower than in the first scenario because some users were now located farther from the access point, but the downlink speed likewise experienced a steep drop without 802.11ax multi-user uplink technology. Turning the latter on allowed the downlink throughput to recover, while uplink speeds took a fairly negligible hit.

Of course, this is just a prototype set-up, and real-world gains will vary according to various factors like the precise location of users in relation to the access point, the number of users, and the type of traffic being transmitted.

Qualcomm also didn’t show us how a scenario with multiple downlink and uplink users would play out. It’s likely that the throughput gains would be less significant because of the markedly greater demand placed on the radio resources, which is why Qualcomm chose to stick to just a single downlink user to show the potential benefits of the technology more clearly.

Faster LTE speeds

Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) is the global standard for LTE in the unlicensed band, or LTE-U, which uses the unlicensed 5GHz spectrum currently utilized by Wi-Fi networks to boost LTE signals. Qualcomm likes to refer to LAA as a “good neighbor” to Wi-Fi, because it will not negatively impact existing Wi-Fi networks in any way by increasing congestion in the available Wi-Fi spectrum.

But while LAA only utilizes the unlicensed spectrum to boost downlink through a process of carrier aggregation, enhanced LAA allows uplink streams to take advantage of the 5GHz band as well. This extends the benefits of LAA to uplink speeds, allowing users to benefit across a wider range of scenarios and applications. What are the benefits of LAA? Put simply, LAA co-exists with Wi-Fi to enable longer range, increased network capacity, and more robust mobility capabilities.

In order to function alongside Wi-Fi without affecting it in any way, LAA employs dynamic channel selection to select the unused channel with the least interference and avoid those used by Wi-Fi. By utilizing something called Listen Before Talk (LBT), LAA deployments routinely check for channel availability, and automatically cycle LTE off if another user is detected.

And because LAA includes a licensed spectrum anchor, it is able to release the 5GHz channel and shift from the aggregated licensed and Wi-Fi spectrums to the licensed one only. At low traffic loads, LAA can also switch off transmission in the unlicensed spectrum and rely entirely on the anchor of the licensed spectrum.

A boon for IoT devices

Finally, we also got a look at Qualcomm’s proximal connectivity technology, which differs from the other two in that it requires zero infrastructure to implement. In fact, Qualcomm tells us that this is the one that is closest to the market. As the number of connected and smart devices continues to proliferate, there is a need for more robust, high-performance, and low-latency data links that can shuttle data between devices. Instead of ensuring faster connections between devices and networks, proximal connectivity serves to improve communication between devices.

If this sounds very much like peer-to-peer connectivity, that’s because it is. Proximity connectivity is a Wi-Fi based, multi-peer connectivity solution that aims to improve the user experience for proximity-based applications.

Qualcomm says there is almost no latency between connections, which makes it ideal for applications like gaming. In a demonstration, we saw that three phablets were able to participate in a multi-player game, with each action reflected almost instantaneously on the other two screens. There’s also the ability to automatically discover other devices when they are within range, making the technology even more suited to proximity-based, mobile games.

On top of that, there’s no need to worry about the host leaving the network, and users can join or leave without any disruption. This also has huge potential for IoT and smart home devices which need to transmit data quickly and reliably to each other, and could possibly open up a new world of proximity-based use cases and applications. The technology will work as long as the devices are in range of the same Wi-Fi network, and Qualcomm says support can be enabled through a simple software update.

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