Much needs to be done to improve the way that politicians, regulators, users and suppliers interact during the process of spectrum reallocation but in addition, RF technology itself needs to recognise that criteria such as link budget, coverage, and spectrum efficiency are not sufficient, and new systems and standards will have to take much more care to cope with coexistence.
The ICT KTN / Cambridge Wireless event, The Future of Spectrum Usage in November 2012 highlighted the importance of radio spectrum to the economy and the difficulties which increasingly arise as spectrum is re-allocated to new services without proper consideration of the impact on existing users of adjacent bands
The ICT KTN / Cambridge Wireless event, The Future of Spectrum Usage in November 2012 highlighted the importance of radio spectrum to the economy and the difficulties which increasingly arise as spectrum is re-allocated to new services without proper consideration of the impact on existing users of adjacent bands
As wireless connections become more widespread, we are moving towards a world where every product of any complexity is likely to have a radio connection of some kind, usually to communicate with other products. Often as the radio systems are designed, little or no consideration is given to their impact on other systems or their vulnerability to interference.
What aspects have to be considered? Just as examples:
- Even low-power “licence free” systems have to be designed considering their likely neighbours and making sure that they can cope with appropriate blocking signals;
- New major standards developments such as LTE must give proper consideration to out-of-band emissions which can’t be filtered out by victim systems;
- RF component and circuit techniques are needed that can implement highly linear processing at low power;
- New technologies are needed for frequency selective filters of higher performance at low cost and small size;
- The Internet has shown us how it is possible to make an all-purpose network that can efficiently route many different kinds of traffic ranging from high-bandwidth data in an office LAN to long-distance voice to IP TV. Is it feasible to design an “electromagnetic Ethernet” that can similarly carry many different traffic types over different ranges using a common protocol, to permit better spectrum sharing?
Is it possible to design systems that can re-use spectrum “invisibly” to primary users of a given band, for example using null-steering antennas?
This event will explore these and other technical issues in support of the UK Spectrum Forum activity which the ICT KTN is configuring. Please book soon to guarantee your place and avoid disappointment.
