IPHOBAC, European’s Beyond 4G Technology

salam.

Long time no see I’m in Bandung now… and I’ve read an interesting information about new technology beyond 4G. It’s called IPHOBAC (sounds trange huh..), stands for Intregated Photonic mili metres- Wave Functions For Broadband Connectivity.

Let’s take a look for a while this technology. It said that this system has succeded demonstrate duplex transmission over than 1.25 Gbps (over radio over fiber system). The Maximum transmission is about 2.88 Gbps, with LOS condition and mulitpath effect are avoided. It’s operate on 60 GHz spectrum, which has not been explorated yet.

So.. How’s the network architecture?

IPHOBAC use FTTH network as it’s base. Just like a femtocell (or distributed antenna system?) connected to FTTH network, it can be used for radio access on home or building to distribute service with a tremendous bandwidth.

IPHOBAC Broadband access Network Architecture Ilustration (source: http://www.ist-iphobac.org/)

Ok.. so what kind of transmission technology does IPHOBAC use?  Triple band OFDM were choosen for the Modulation technique. The total bandwidth is 1.6 GHz, centered at 60.7 GHz, and it’s one of the modulation scheme proposedd for 802.15.3c (I haven’t explored this standard yet ) But currently for testing, IPHOBAC use UWB ECMA-368 radio interface (modified verison), centered on 60 GHz, and transmitted continuously on three UWB sub bands to be closer on 802.15.3c specification.

Data rate as a function of the propagation distance assuming that the best constellation (QPSK to 32QAM) is used on each OFDM sub-band depending on the measured EVM with the constraint of  having a BER<10^-5. (source, http://www.ist-iphobac.org/)

This is a quote from the official site:

Up to 15m and even in the worst case, a datarate of 1.25 Gb/s is achieved. For distances less than 1 m, 8-QAM modulation can be used on all bands, leading to a total data rate of 2.88 GBps in full duplex (See figure 2). Between 5 and 10 m, the data rate decreases because QPSK has to be used on at least one of the sub-bands. The spread between the maximum and minimum data rate for a given distance increases with radio propagation distance. This is due to propagation frequency selective fading produced by multi-path interferences in the corridor. The datarate achievable can thus vary significantly between two close locations. OFDM modulation is particularly well adapted to the application of equalization techniques in order to mitigate effects of multi-path fadings, however, these are beyond the scope of this study and where not used here. For more than 10 meters, the limitation of the system performance is attributable to the phase noise of the TX and RX.

for complete technical reports, you can follow this link. Hope this post will be useful for us, thanks. Salam.