4G Technology – An Analysis

4G Technology An Analysis 4G refers to the Fourth Generation of cellular wireless standards in telecommunications that will succeed it predecessors 3G 2G. It is a high-speed broadband wireless network that offered comprehensive & secure all IP based services. According to the ITU, requirements for 4G standards were specified by IMT-Advanced (International Mobile Telecommunication-Advanced). The data rates of 4G service for high mobility communication was set to 100 Mbps and low mobility communication was set to 1 Gbps. It focuses on cellular system with extremely high data rates & the concept of seamless technology in all wireless systems. Carriers that are using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) as an alternative to TDMA and CDMA are promoting their services as 4G even though their data rates are not high according to the ITU. 4G outdoor users that have Internet access through cell phones or smart phones were promised to have a targeted data speed of around 100 Mbps by the IMT-Advanced and t he data speed for indoor users such as LAN (Local Area Network) was suppose to be around 1Gbps. This type of higher speed for both fixed and mobile Internet users is truly amazing. 4G proposes scalable channel bandwidth flexibility of up to 40 MHz. The network resources are dynamically utilized & shared to sustain more simultaneous users over each call. 4G also has the ability to propose high QoS (Quality of Service) for multimedia support and offer smooth handover heterogeneous networks. It must also have the ability to offer wireless LAN roaming & interact with systems used for video broadcasting. Figure 5: Seamless Connection of Networks in 4G [5]. The 4G architecture comprises of 3 crucial areas of connectivity namely PAN (Personal Area Network) WAN (Wide Area Network Cellular Connectivity Each device will have the ability to interact with the Internet based information that is modified over the network used by the device at that time. This structure can support a wide r ange of 4G mobile devices that sustain global roaming. In 4G networks users that join the network have the ability to add mobile routers to the infrastructure. Changing user patterns can be accommodated by dynamically shifting network capacity & coverage. Creating additional routes as the concentration of people is higher in one area compared to the other enables additional access to the capacity of the network. Users can easily avoid congested routes by hoping to the less congested routes. This allows the network to automatically balance the capacity by increasing the network utilization. The service for all the users improve with the increase in number of users. Need for 4G One of the questions that come to mind when thinking about future 4G systems is there need. The first application to be mobilized was voice telephony, few years ago. The short message service (SMS) was the first application to be introduced as a mass-market application. The hardware complexity was not an issue at the given time along with the advantage of small bandwidth requirements. The SMS was just the commencement of various data services like mobile email, web browsing etc. The key feature in most of them was the packet based wireless networks carrying IP data in one hand and powerful terminals that could cope with these applications on the other. Although the network capacity is still not an issue due to less number of users, there are number of reasons for increased bandwidth requirements in the future. First, the number of wireless users increases exponentially resulting into an increase in bandwidth requirement. Second, the popularity of video and music downloads has increased immensely within few years. The information content in a video or music is more than the corresponding text but so is the capacity requirement. Last but not the least, mobile social networks have taken the current internet usage to a much higher level. Picture viewing sites, web blogs and also video sharing sites have reshaped the internet.