Nokia hits record single carrier bit rate of 1.52 Tbps over 80 km

Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs achieved a world record for the highest single carrier bit rate at 1.52 Terabits per second (Tbps) over 80 km of standard single mode fiber.

Marcus Weldon, Nokia CTO and President of Nokia Bell Labs, said: “It has been fifty years since the inventions of the low-loss fiber and the associated optics. From the original 45 Megabit-per-second systems to more than 1 Terabit-per-second systems of today – a more than 20,000-fold increase in 40 years – to create the fundamental underpinning of the internet and the digital societies as we know it. The role of Nokia Bell Labs has always been to push the envelope and redefine the limits of what’s possible. Our latest world records in optical research are yet another proof point that we are inventing even faster and more robust networks that will underpin the next industrial revolution.”

The Nokia Bell Labs optical research team, which was led by Fred Buchali, employed a new 128 Gigasample/second converter enabling the generation of signals at 128 Gbaud symbol rate and information rates of the individual symbols beyond 6.0 bits/symbol/polarization.  This accomplishment breaks the team’s own record of 1.3 Tbit/s set in September 2019 while supporting Nokia’s record-breaking field trial with Etisalat.

Several of these achievements were presented as part of Nokia Bell Labs’ post deadline research papers at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference & Exhibition (OFC) in San Diego.

Additionally, Nokia Bell Labs researcher Di Che was awarded the OFC Tingye Li Innovation Prize.

Recently, Di Che and team also set a new data-rate world record for directly modulated lasers (DML) by transmitting a 400 Gbps signal up to 15 km.

Nokia Bell Labs also highlighted the following significant achievements in optical communications:

The first field trial using spatial-division-multiplexed (SDM) cable over a 2,000km span of 4-core coupled-core fiber was achieved by researchers Roland Ryf and the SDM team. The experiments clearly show that coupled-core fibers are technically viable, offer high transmission performance, while maintaining an industry standard 125-um cladding diameter.
A research team led by Rene-Jean Essiambre, Roland Ryf and Murali Kodialam introduced a novel new set of modulation formats that provide improved linear and nonlinear transmission performance at submarine distances of 10,000 km. The proposed transmission formats are generated by a neuronal network and can significantly outperform traditional formats (QPSK) used in today’s submarine systems.
Researcher Junho Cho and team experimentally demonstrated capacity gains of 23% for submarine cable systems that operate under electrical supply power constraints. The capacity gains were achieved by optimizing the gain shaping filters using neural networks.
The researchers that achieved the world record and research results are part of Nokia Bell Labs’ Smart Optical Fabric & Devices Research Lab, which designs and builds the future of optical communications systems, pushing the state-of-the-art in physics, materials science, math, software and optics to create new networks that adapt to changing conditions and go far beyond today’s limitations.

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Nokia Bell Labs increases battery energy density 2.5X with Ireland's AMBER

Nokia Bell Labs and AMBER, the SFI Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research hosted at Trinity College Dublin, have developed a new formula for battery composition that increases energy density of batteries 2.5X. The researchers see far-reaching implications for smartphones, drones, electric cars, robots, etc.

A patent has been filed to protect this new technology design and help bring it to the marketplace. A study discussing the battery research performed by Nokia Bell Labs and AMBER has been published in Nature Energy a leading international science journal. Carbon nanotubes are cited as an enabling technology

Nokia Bell Labs has been collaborating with AMBER as part of the Nokia Bell Labs Distinguished Academic Partners Program. The program brings together Nokia Bell Labs researchers with the best and brightest minds at the world's top universities to solve future human needs, transform human existence, and deliver disruptive innovations.

"By packing more energy into a smaller space, this new battery technology will have a profound impact on 5G and the entire networked world," said Paul King, one of the lead investigators on the project and Member of the Technical Staff, Nokia Bell Labs.  "The combination of Nokia Bell Labs industry and device knowledge and AMBER's materials science expertise allowed us to tackle an extremely difficult problem involving multiple disciplines. Our results were achieved through the deeply collaborative mode in which we work, underscoring the value of engaging with AMBER as part of our global research strategy."

"The significant advancement in battery technology outlined in this research is a testament to the strong collaboration between AMBER and Nokia Bell Labs. Bringing scientists together from industry and academia with a common research goal has resulted in a substantial scientific breakthrough," said Dr. Lorraine Byrne, AMBER Executive Director. "AMBER's partnership with Nokia Bell Labs through their Distinguished Academic Partners Program has been a hugely positive experience and clearly illustrates the benefits of industry-academic engagements. I look forward to AMBER's collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs continuing to break new boundaries in science creating impact for society."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0398-y

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Nokia Bell Labs Prize offers up to $175,000 - entries close April 25

Nokia Bell Labs opened its fifth annual global Prize competition for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The Nokia Bell Labs Prize competition, which offers up to $175,000 to the first, second and third place winners, "seeks disruptive innovative proposals that address the grand human challenges that drive and will underpin the fourth industrial revolution, and enable an enhanced ability to sense, control and automate everything." Entries will be accepted until April 25, 2018.

Marcus Weldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs & CTO for Nokia, said: "We are at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution that will transform human existence in previously unimaginable ways.The Bell Labs Prize seeks innovators who will power this revolution, with an interest in collaborating with a wide diversity of intellects, disciplines, backgrounds, skills, geographies, philosophies...everything - that's the classic 'Bell Labs way', and the secret of our success."

https://bell-labs.com/prize/

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Mitsubishi Electric and Nokia Bell Labs develop GaN amplifier

Mitsubishi Electric, Nokia Bell Labs and the Center for Wireless Communications at UC San Diego have announced the joint development of what is claimed as the first ultra-fast gallium nitride (GaN) envelope-tracking power amplifier, offering support for modulation bandwidth up to 80 MHz and designed to reduce power consumption in next-generation wireless base stations.

To companies explained that to address demand for greater wireless capacity, mobile technologies are adopting systems that use complex modulated signals with high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and extra-wide modulation bandwidth. This requires power amplifiers to often operate at backed-off power levels below their saturation levels, while power amplifiers are typically efficient near to their saturation power level and not at backed off levels, as with 4G LTE signals (>6 dB PAPR).

As a result, envelope-tracking power amplifiers have been evaluated as a means to enhance power-amplifier efficiency, although to date the supply-modulator circuit has proved a bottleneck limiting modulation bandwidth for advanced wireless communications, such as LTE-Advanced.

The newly-developed ultra-fast GaN envelope-tracking power amplifier delivers high performance leveraging Mitsubishi Electric's high-frequency GaN transistor technology and its design for the GaN supply-modulator circuit. Utilising Nokia Bell Labs' real-time digital pre-distortion (DPD) system, the power amplifier has demonstrated efficient operation, including with 80 MHz modulated LTE signals.

The partners claim that this represents the widest modulation bandwidth achieved for this application to date, and is around four times higher than signals used in other envelope-tracking power amplifiers. In addition, the technology delivers a drain efficiency of 41.6% in this wide-bandwidth operation, helping to reduce base-station energy consumption as well as increase wireless communication speed and capacity.

Additionally, the Nokia Bell Labs' real-time DPD system enables pre-distortion for wideband signals to correct the output signal from the power amplifier, resulting in an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of -45 dBc for LTE 80 MHz signals, which is compatible with wireless communication standards.

Specifications of the GaN envelope-tracking power amplifier include: support for carrier frequency of 0.9 to 2.15 GHz; output power of 30.0-30.7 dBm; drain efficiency of 36.5-41.6%; ACLR of -45 dBc; and modulation signal of 80 MHz LTE Advanced with 6.5 dB PAPR.

The University of California, San Diego, is a leading university for mixed-signal, microwave and mmWave RFICs, digital communications, applied electromagnetics, RF MEMS and nano-electronics research and hosts the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC), is a university-industry partnership that includes Mitsubishi Electric and Nokia.

http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2017/0519.pdf

http://www.nokia.com/en_int/news/releases

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Nokia Bell Labs, T-Labs and TU Munich Hit 1 Tbps w New Modulation

Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have demonstrated a new modulation technique that achieved a net 1 Terabit per second transmission rate -  close to the theoretical maximum information transfer rate of that channel and thus approaching the Shannon Limit of the fiber link.

The trial, which was carried out as part of the Safe and Secure European Routing (SASER) project, used the optical fiber network of Deutsche Telekom. Bell Labs is calling the novel novel modulation approach "Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS)."  It uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats to achieve higher transmission capacity over a given channel to significantly improve the spectral efficiency of optical communications. PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points - the alphabet of the transmission - are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach.

Marcus Weldon, president Nokia Bell Labs & Nokia CTO, said:  "Future optical networks not only need to support orders of magnitude higher capacity, but also the ability to dynamically adapt to channel conditions and traffic demand. Probabilistic Constellation Shaping offers great benefits to service providers and enterprises by enabling optical networks to operate closer to the Shannon Limit to support massive datacenter interconnectivity and provide the flexibility and performance required for modern networking in the digital era."

https://www.bell-labs.com/

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Bell Labs Study Quantifies Residential vCPE Gains

A new study from Bell Labs claims that communications service providers can dramatically reduce their operating costs by up to 40% by ‘virtualizing’ complex functions currently deployed on residential gateways into the network cloud.

A virtualized residential gateway (vRGW) moves functions like IP routing and Network Address Translation (NAT) into the cloud, along with centralized management and control. This lets service providers introduce a more simplified, bridged gateway model making it easier for the user to successfully install, operate and maintain their home network, without having to make service calls or home visits.

Bell Labs estimates that a vRGW can reduce the costs of service fulfilment, assurance and lifecycle management up to 40%. In addition to reducing operating cost and improving the customer experience, a virtualized gateway model allows new services to be introduced more rapidly and consistently across the installed base of residential gateway devices.

Key Facts:

• The Bell Labs study reveals cost savings in the following categories:
• Service fulfillment: 7-12% cost reduction - a simpler residential gateway, extended auto-installation capabilities and network-based service capabilities lead to faster turning up of upgrades or new services and fewer home visits  by technicians to address service activation or upgrade issues. Home visits can easily represent over 80% of service fulfillment cost.
• Service assurance: 63-67% cost reduction - service provider data shows that 30-40% of trouble tickets are related to issues deeper in the network. These can be resolved better by virtualizing and centralizing these deeper functions in combination with home device management capabilities.
• Life-cycle management: approximate 66% cost reduction - although life-cycle management costs are relatively small compared to fulfillment and assurance costs, enhanced service velocity and agility improve service innovation, time to market, and revenue.

In addition to boosting profitability, a virtualized residential gateway delivers structural improvements in customer experience, service velocity and operational agility.

Alcatel-Lucent’s virtualized residential gateway solution is supported by both the 7750 SR and the Virtualized Service Router product line, and complemented by the Motive vRGW Controller  and the 7368 ISAM CPE and ONT product lines. The company’s vRGW solution is available now, with more capabilities being introduced in first half 2016.

"While the operating cost savings are essential to sustain profitable growth, having a well thought out  VRGW architecture is a pre-requisite to enable service providers to seamlessly extend the home network into the Cloud,” said. “This is critical to operationalize the rapid introduction of new features and automate the delivery of new value added services for the home network, without having the necessity to upgrade the customer premises equipment," stated Enrique Hernandez-Valencia, Consulting Director, Bell Labs.

https://www.alcatel-lucent.com/

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Bell Labs' MIMO-SDM Sets Path to Petabit/Sec Optical Transmission

Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, announced a space-division multiplexed optical multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO-SDM) system with the potential to increase current 10 to 20 Terabit-per-second fiber capacities to Petabit-per-second capacity - the equivalent of 1,000 Terabits/s.

Bell Labs said it has demonstrated real-time 6x6 MIMO-SDM using six transmitters and six receivers in combination with real- time digital signal processing to remove cross-talk.  The experiment was conducted over a 60-km-long coupled-mode fiber in Bell Labs’ headquarters in New Jersey.

The researchers claim this MIMO-SDM technique could overcome the capacity limitations imposed by the non-linear ‘Shannon limit’ on current optical fiber.

“This experiment represents a major breakthrough in the development of future optical transport. We are at the crossroads of a huge change in communications networks, with the advent of 5G Wireless and cloud networking underway. Operators and enterprises alike will see their networks challenged by massive increases in traffic. At Bell Labs we are continuously innovating to shape the future of communications networks to meet those demands,” said Marcus Weldon, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent and President of Bell Labs.

Alcatel-Lucent announced the first commercially available single-carrier 100G technology in June 2010 and the first commercially available 100G/200G single-carrier line card in 2014, that can deliver up to 24 Tbps capacity.

In 2013, Alcatel-Lucent announced the first deployment of a 400G superchannel optical link with FT Orange with a capacity of 17.6 terabits-per-second, based on the 400G Photonic Service Engine (PSE), co-developed by Bell Labs.

https://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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FANTASTIC-5G Targets sub-6 Ghz Air Interface

A group of 16 leading players in the field of telecommunications kicked off the “FANTASTIC-5G Project” (Flexible Air iNTerfAce for Scalable service delivery wiThin wIreless Communication networks of the 5th Generation) with the aim of developing a new air interface below 6 GHz for 5G networks.

Specifically, the 2-year FANTASTIC-5G project will develop a new multi-service air interface that is:

• Highly flexible, to support different types of data traffic.
• Scalable, to support an ever-growing number of networked devices.
• Versatile, to support diverse device types and traffic/transmission characteristics.
• Energy- and resource-efficient, to better use the available spectrum.
• Future-proofed, enabling easy upgrades to future software releases.

FANTASTIC-5G has received eight million Euros of funding by the European Commission under the EU´s “Horizon 2020” initiative aiming to advance digital Europe.

The members of FANTASTIC-5G include service providers (Orange, Telecom Italia), component and infrastructure vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Sequans Communications, Wings ICT Solutions), universities (Aalborg University, Politecnico di Bari, Institut Mines-Telecom/Telecom Bretagne, University of Bremen) and research institutes (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives - Laboratoire d’électronique et de technologie de l’information (CEA-Leti), Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institut (HHI)) from Europe.

“FANTASTIC-5G is of key importance, as the multi-service air interface concepts being developed in the project will be evaluated and validated by the partners. This helps to build up consensus and to facilitate the standardization process of 5G”, says Frank Schaich from Alcatel-Lucent´s Bell Labs, who is leading the FANTASTIC-5G project.

http://www.fantastic-5g.com

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Bell Labs Dedicates Nobel Laureate Garden

Bell Labs, the industrial research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, dedicated a Nobel Laureate Garden within its campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey to commemorate the 13 Bell Labs scientists that have shared eight Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry.

Bell Labs' most recent Nobel Laureate, Eric Betzig, who received his Nobel Prize in 2014 for his transformative work on molecular and biological imaging, spoke at the garden's dedication ceremony. Also present were George Smith (2009 Nobel Prize in Physics); Horst Stormer (1998 Nobel Prize in Physics); Bob Wilson (1978 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Philip Anderson (1977 Nobel Prize in Physics).

https://www.bell-labs.com
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Freescale and Bell Labs Extend Collaboration in Wireless

Freescale Semiconductor and Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs agreed to expand a long-term partnership in both commercial and research endeavors, pairing Freescale’s networking silicon and software with Bell Labs’ systems knowledge.  The companies are collaborating on a range of new initiatives intended to drive further innovation for the world’s increasingly virtualized networks. Specifically, the companies will collaborate to create an industry-first universal access device that can flexibly be used for any combination of wireline and wireless connections.

“The longstanding partnership between Freescale and Alcatel-Lucent has produced novel solutions that help leading mobile operators differentiate and win with base station deployments offering exceptional throughput, optimal user density and outstanding power efficiency,” said Tom Deitrich, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Digital Networking group. “As the Internet of Tomorrow grows the number of network endpoints, boosting throughput and enhancing quality of service become even more important. This is where we intend to focus moving forward, as we continue our fruitful partnership with Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs.”

http://otp.investis.com/clients/us/free_scale/usn/usnews-story.aspx?cid=896&newsid=28654

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Bell Labs Quantifies Benefits of IP/Optical Control Integration

Network operators who use converged IP and optical transport technologies can significantly ease the burden being placed on their infrastructure by demands for capacity caused by the explosion of bandwidth-hungry applications, according to a study by Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent.

The study found that by converging routing and optical transport technologies operators can meet the same requirements for service availability while using up to 40% less network resources, such as 100G router ports and optical transponders.

Some key findings:

• An integrated resiliency strategy saves costs while still guaranteeing network and service availability
• Introducing protection for the optical layer based on GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching) allows service providers to meet the same availability levels achieved by routing protection methods based on MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), with total savings up to 40% on router ports and optical transponders over a five year period.
• The combination of IP and optical transport layer protection with a GMPLS user network interface (UNI) allows service providers to accelerate these savings by freeing up a third of deployed network capacity and provide headroom for two years of traffic growth.

The key recommendations for service providers:

• Introduce an Agile Optical Network with a dynamic GMPLS control plane
• Extend optical transport layer control to the IP routing layer with GMPLS UNI
• Provide open, programmable Software Defined Network (SDN) interfaces based on open standards

"We know network traffic continues to increase exponentially, especially with new Cloud applications and ‘the rise of the machines’ on the horizon. This study provides the foundation for what will be a deep look into new optimized, network architectures and infrastructure,” stated Ben Tang, a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/press/2015/bell-labs-study-reveals-how-integrating-ip-and-optical-technologies-can-ease-network-capacity
http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/techzine/quantifying-ipoptical-integration-synergies/

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Blueprint: How Your Data Networks Can Sustainably Grow

by Thierry Klein, Network Energy Research Program Leader, Bell Labs / Alcatel-Lucent

In a world where leaving the office at the end of the day without one of our devices is hardly imaginable, individuals have become reliant on the technology that keeps them connected during all parts of their waking life. As more and more consumer devices are added to the network, daily Internet traffic is growing dramatically.

To put some concrete numbers behind this:

• Smartphones and tablets will drive mobile traffic to grow up to 89 times by 2020 from 2010.
• By 2017 more than 5 zettabytes of data will pass through the networks every year.
• Enjoy tweeting? Well, that is the equivalent of everyone in the world tweeting non-stop for more than 100 years.

As we know, it takes quite a bit of energy to power our devices so that they can process that data. While battery and power cell technology continues to improve, our consumption continues to grow. In addition to powering the mobile devices, we also need to power the data networks that connect those devices to the Internet. The significant increase in energy consumption and associated energy cost continue to create a key challenge facing the ICT industry today. With massive amounts of devices connecting and users expecting fast, uninterrupted service, how can network providers stay on top of demand in a fully connected world? What can we do to ensure that our networks can support the exponential growth in traffic that will result from these increases in the near future?

One of the challenges we face as an industry is supporting that growth in a sustainable and economically viable way. Network energy bills represent more than 10 percent of the operators’ operational expenses and can even reach as high as 30 percent in developing markets. In 2013, 69 gigawatts – the equivalent of powering New York City 12 times over – was used to keep global data and communication networks, including data centers, running.

Network operators are eager to reduce energy consumption, costs and the carbon footprint of their networks, they’re also working to understand how the network’s energy consumption will evolve based on technology evolution over the next several years. Advancements have been made to address the explosive network growth, but not everyone is aware of them, nor are they familiar with their capabilities and the problems they can solve.

Let’s take an in-depth look at some of the tools available to assist operators as they plan for network growth in a sustainable and economically viable way.

The Global “What if” Analyzer of NeTwork Energy ConsumpTion (G.W.A.T.T.)

To understand the issues facing network growth, Alcatel-Lucent’s research and innovation arm, Bell Labs, has developed an interactive application to highlight the current energy consumption of our ICT networks and of the Internet.

The Global “What if” Analyzer of NeTwork Energy ConsumpTion application (or G.W.A.T.T. for short) forecasts trends in energy consumption and efficiency based on different traffic growth and technology evolution scenarios. This interactive, self-guided tool provides operators the guidance they need to understand the energy consumption and efficiency of their networks, as well as the energy consumption of specific applications such as high-bandwidth video or gaming applications running over the networks.

Using G.W.A.T.T., operators can model their network evolution and show the impact on network energy consumption, cost and carbon footprint from new technologies such as LTE, small cells, heterogeneous networks, VDSL2 Vectoring or VoIP migration. G.W.A.T.T. also provides insights into potential energy benefits coming from network transformation scenarios based on SDN and NFV technologies.

With the help of forecasted trends in energy consumption and efficiency based on different traffic growth and technology evolution scenarios, G.W.A.T.T. allows network operators to specifically pinpoint how these new technologies and high-bandwidth services are impacting the home and enterprise networks, the wireless and fixed access networks, the metro, edge and core backbone networks, and the service core and data centers. This plan allows operators to see any “hot spots” where most of the energy is consumed within the network. Additionally, it can identify the impact of different network transformations and gradual technology deployments to provide a more energy-efficient network evolution process.

Addressing a variety of key questions, G.W.A.T.T. aims to provide answers to key concerns:

• What is the overall energy consumption of the telecommunication networks?
• Where is most of the energy consumed in the end-to-end network today, and how much does it cost to power the network now and in the future?
• How much energy is consumed by wireless networks? By data centers?
• What is the impact of traffic growth and new applications and services on the energy consumption of current networks as well as future SDN and NFV-based networks?
• How will the network’s energy consumption evolve based on technology evolution over the next several years?

G.W.A.T.T. has been built to allow operators the opportunity to understand these evolutions and to offer a moment of reflection on the best way to ensure that energy supply matches demand in the future. Over time, Bell Labs will continue to expand the capabilities of G.W.A.T.T. — refining its modeling capabilities, adding new network scenarios and including future technologies in the hope that, with the advent of the Internet of Things and video consumption being at an all-time high, networks have the upper hand to support their growth while decreasing their energy consumption.

The Power of GreenTouch

GreenTouch, a consortium of leading ICT industry, academic and non-governmental research experts, strives to deliver the architecture, specification and technologies needed to increase energy efficiency by a factor of 1,000 compared to 2010 levels by designing fundamentally new network architectures and creating the enabling technologies on which they are based.

Many of today’s networks are optimized for performance, however not for energy efficiency. This can lead to large carbon footprints. Currently accounting for an estimated 2 percent of the global GHG footprint, the entire ICT sector has the potential to reduce global GHG emissions in other industry sectors by 16.5 percent by 2020, amounting to $1.9 trillion in gross energy and fuel savings and a reduction of 9.1 GtCO2e of GHG. When a network is optimized for both performance and energy, a very different design and architecture comes to play, and this is what is needed to be sustainable in the future and realize the full benefit of ICT’s enabling effect on GHG emissions.

GreenTouch brings together the expertise needed to discuss and innovate ways for new technologies to work in concert, while achieving sustainable networks in the near — and not so near — future.

By knowing more about how our networks use energy, research organizations hope to one day build self-sustaining networks powered by natural elements at hand.

G.W.A.T.T. and GreenTouch offer network operators tools and research to help, not hinder, the growth of our communication networks, leaving both the end user and the earth in a happier place.

About the Author 

Dr. Thierry E. Klein is currently the Program Leader for the Network Energy Research Program at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent leading a team of researchers, engineers and scientists across multiple research domains and locations with the mission to conduct research towards the design, development and use of sustainable future communications and data networks. His team is based in Murray Hill, Crawford Hill, Stuttgart, Villarceaux and Dublin. He also serves as the Chairman of the Technical Committee of GreenTouch, a global consortium dedicated to improve energy efficiency in networks by a factor 1000x compared to 2010 levels. Since 2014, he is also a member of the Momentum for Change Advisory Panel of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Dr. Klein earned an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Université de Nantes and the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in Nantes, France, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He is an author on over 35 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications and an inventor on 36 patent applications.

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Bell Labs Tunes its G.W.A.T.T. Energy Consumption Tool

Bell Labs released an updated version of its G.W.A.T.T. application, which helps operators plan for the energy consumption and efficiency of their networks.

Version 2.0 of G.W.A.T.T. (Global ‘What if’ Analyzer of NeTwork Energy ConsumpTion) offers greater flexibility in the way operators model their network evolution.  It will also allow them to better understand the impact on network energy consumption, cost and carbon footprint from greater use of new technologies, such as SDN and NFV, as well as high-bandwidth video and gaming applications.

Updates to the application include:

• New methods of modelling the energy impact of introducing SDN and NFV virtualization technologies.
• A way to model specific high-bandwidth apps such as video and gaming.
• The ability to change traffic growth assumptions based on changing market conditions and an operator’s own network intelligence.
• The ability to model phased network upgrades, selecting parts of the network to see the impact of a phased upgrade where before operators could only select 100% technology replacement.

http://gwatt.net/

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Alcatel-Lucent Completes Sale of LGS Innovations

Alcatel-Lucent completed its previously announced sale of its subsidiary LGS Innovations LLC to a US-based company owned by a Madison Dearborn Partners-led investor group that includes CoVant.

LGS Innovations LLC provides secure networking, satellite communications, VoIP, optical routers and other solutions for the US national security, defense, and advanced research communities, and has a heritage as a trusted partner of the US Federal Government extending back over 60 years.  The company is based in Herndon, Virginia.

The sale price was $200 million, of which 50% is paid at closing.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Bell Labs Forecasts 560% Growth in Metro Traffic by 2017

Data traffic on metro access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 percent by 2017, according to a new study by Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs.  The researchers predict that by 2017 more than 75 percent of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57 percent today.

Some highlight of the "Metro Network Traffic Growth: An Architecture Impact Study”:

• Traffic from video services will skyrocket by as much as 720 percent by 2017.
• Cloud and data center traffic - consumer connections to data centers and interconnection between data centers - will increase more than 440 percent by 2017.
• Combined, video and data center traffic are the key drivers to the overall forecast increase of 560 percent traffic growth in the metro.
• Total Metro traffic will grow approximately two times faster than traffic going into the backbone network by 2017.
• By 2017, 75 percent of total traffic will terminate within the metro network and 25 percent of traffic will traverse the backbone network as video, data and web content is increasingly sourced from within metro networks.

The 12-page paper is online.

http://resources.alcatel-lucent.com/asset/171568

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Marcus Weldon appointed President of Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs

Dr. Marcus Weldon has been appointed President of Bell Labs, replacing Gee Rittenhouse, who has has decided to retire from Alcatel-Lucent in order to focus on other business interests.

Weldon has served as Corporate CTO of Alcatel-Lucent since 2009. He joined Bell Labs in 1995, and has held a variety of leadership roles in both research and technology development functions. Dr. Weldon was one of the primary architects behind the evolution of the company's Triple-Play Service Delivery Architecture to the High Leverage Network. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Computer Science from King’s College, London, and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Gee Rittenhouse Named President of Bell Labs

Alcatel-Lucent named Gee Rittenhouse as President of Bell Labs, replacing Jeong Kim, who is to return to his native South Korea, where he is to be appointed as the country’s new Minister of Future Creation and Science.

Gee Rittenhouse, currently chief operating officer of Alcatel-Lucent’s technology platforms business, has an extensive experience within Bell Labs, as head of Bell Labs Research and in overseeing all Bell Labs research centers and activities for Alcatel-Lucent. He also chaired GreenTouch, an industry-wide consortium launched by Bell Labs whose goal is making a thousand fold improvement to the energy efficiency of ICT networks.

Gee received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986 and his Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1993. In 2002, Gee received the Bell Labs Fellow Award.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Bell Labs: Internet Video to Push Networks to their Limit

Driven by tablet usage at home and on the go, consumers in the United States alone will access seven hours of video each day – as opposed to 4.8 hours today, according to a new study from Bell Labs.  The research points to a dramatic shift in viewing habits, as consumers switch from broadcast content to video-on-demand services, which will grow to 70% of daily consumption compared with 33% today.

Some highlights of the 16-page report:

• The proportion of time spent watching managed video-on-demand services and web-based video will grow from 33% to 77%. This will come at the expense of traditional broadcast TV services, whose relative share of time will drop from 66% to 10%.
• Internet-based video consumption each year will grow twelvefold, from 90 Exabytes to 1.1 Zettabyes.
• Consumption of managed video-on-demand from services providers versus OTTs is expected grow at 28 percent annual rate, from 44 Exabytes to 244 Exabytes.
• 10.5% of managed video consumption and 8.5% of OTT video consumption will occur at the peak hour, 8:00 p.m.

Bell Labs is warning that this shift to unicast distribution will put disproportionate pressure on the IP edge of broadband networks.

"Delivery of video from the cloud and from content delivery networks to tablets, TVs and smartphones - with guaranteed quality -, presents an exciting new revenue opportunity for communications service providers, but only if they are prepared to take advantage of it. Left unmanaged, the rapid growth in video traffic can turn into a deluge and spell disaster. It is important to look at where service providers’ investments can have the most impact, and this research makes clear that the IP edge of both wireline and wireless networks – which are increasingly becoming one and the same - offers the greatest opportunity to improve network performance. At the same time, it also presents the greatest source of risk if not managed appropriately,” stated Marcus Weldon, Chief Technology Officer, Alcatel-Lucent.

The full paper is available here:
http://bit.ly/12oijPC
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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The future of wireless is small, but very, very big

by Marcus Weldon, CTO, Alcatel-Lucent

We are at a defining moment in broadband network deployment.  We are on the verge of a transformation in behaviors so profound that what we think is normal now will be viewed as quaint and amusingly antique in the same way that the Model T Ford, or wooden-cabinet enshrouded black and white TVs, or dial-up internet access are viewed today.  And this behavioral change will not be limited as before to a certain socio-economic class or age demographic, or geography, or educational background - it will be universal in extent, ageless and classless in adoption, and will redefine economies and the nature of commerce. 

What is the driving force behind this unparalleled new reality?  A device: the tablet.  To understand how something that you are probably holding in your hand or carrying in your backpack right now is going to change our reality, consider what that device is and can become for you.  It is already a device on which you communicate (email, video chat, messaging), you watch video content, you play games, you listen to music, you read books, you navigate (in 2D and 3D), you view documents and presentations, you surf the web, you monitor and control your home, you record videos, you control your TV and more and more applications appear every hour and every day.   In essence, this device defines and enables a new digital life - your life wherever and whenever you are.  

But what has this got to with the future of wireless or networking?  Well it is this last observation - the 'whenever and wherever you are' - that has truly profound consequences for networks, and in particular wireless networks.  But to fully appreciate this, it is first important to realize that although the tablet is a remarkable device, it isn't capable enough to store or process your life and it is unlikely that it will be...at least for the next decade or so.  In short, current tablets have the processing power and storage capacity of an 8-10 year old PC.  And even a current PC hard drive doesn't have enough capacity to store all our digital media objects, which is why we increasingly rely on external storage and Cloud storage as a complement to local hard drive storage.  With the advent of Cloud storage we not only get access to seemingly infinite storage capacity at the lowest cost per gigabyte, but we can access the stored content from any device anywhere, without having to replicate it on every device everywhere.  So even as storage density and processing power continue the seemingly inexorable march of Moore's Law (doubling every 18 months), our demand will always exceed the local supply on a mobile device, with its intrinsic power, size and cost constraints.

The intrinsic connection between these two elements: the tablet and the Cloud is the root of the manifest change in wireless networks that will occur, because without an ultra-high capacity wireless network infrastructure this nascent demand and vision for a new digital economy cannot be realized.  In order to quantify this future demand, Bell Labs have built a future demand model for the tablet generation that predicts that by 2016, the intrinsic demand (unconstrained by economics of supply) will be more than 80x today's average demand even when averaged across different demographic age groups.  So, in essence, there are two central questions we must address to realize this future:

1)      How can we increase the capacity of wireless networks by 80x (or more)?

2)      How can we afford to do this?

I will exclusively focus on the first question here, and defer the second critical question for another time.  This question of the ultimate capacity of wireless networks would, at first glance, seem to require a futurist or information theorist to answer.  But in reality, the problem can be parameterized in a way that reduces the need for technological clairvoyance or new theorems.  In essence, there are 3 basic dimensions of capacity growth in wireless networks: A) More spectrum, B) More spectral efficiency and C) More spatially efficient use of that (efficiently-utilized) spectrum.  And it is the product of these 3 capacity elements from which one will derive the ultimate wireless network capacity.  Or, to put it simply:  

Ultimate wireless network capacity, U = A * B * C

 

So what are the right values of A, B and C?  Interestingly, although the answer to this question would require a detailed analysis for any specific network or deployment scenario, the parametric, or limiting (maximum) values are relatively simple to compute, and are summarized in Figure 1.

If we start by considering the value of A), i.e. the maximum amount of additional spectrum that will likely be made available, we have to consider both licensed and unlicensed spectrum contributions.  In terms of licensed spectrum, approximately 500-600 Mhz of spectrum is currently allocated (Figure 2) for commercial wireless services below 3Ghz (the cut-off for commercial terrestrial deployments due to the non-line of sight, superior propagation of this spectrum), and it is commonly accepted that another 500-600 Mhz could be made available by various refarming, repacking and reallocation schemes.  

In addition to this, approximately 500-600 Mhz of unlicensed spectrum is currently available across the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands and could be utilized to augment the licensed spectrum, particularly for best effort, lower QoS services delivery.  

So, this simple summary analysis suggests that a 2-3x increase in spectrum is a realistic possibility, with a concomitant 2-3x increase in wireless network capacity.

If we now consider element B), the use of sophisticated physics and engineering to increase the spectral efficiency, a number of approaches have to be considered and quantified.  But first, it is important to recognize that we are already operating within 20% of the Shannon Limit for a wireless communications channel, so the gains will largely come from 4 factors:

1)     More efficient use of disjoint spectrum assets: Use ‘Carrier Aggregation’ to deliver higher peak capacity across the aggregated bands

2)     More spatial paths: Use Higher-order MIMO with more transmit diversity to improve received Signal to Interference + Noise Ratio (SINR)

3)     Decrease interference: Use enhanced inter-cell interference cancellation (eICIC) to reduce the received noise and therefore increase SINR

4)     Coordinate transmission from multiple cells: Use so-called ‘network MIMO’ (formally known as Coherent Multipath (CoMP)) techniques to improve the coherent signal strength at the receiver and increase SINR

Although each of the four techniques can provide significant gains under certain circumstances, such as at the cell edge or in lightly loaded cells, when the average improvement is computed across all locations and usage scenarios the gains are typically on the order of 20% per technique, or a total of a factor of 2, if all techniques are employed together.

So by now it should be clear that if capacity growth by more than a factor of 6 is required, a new approach is required. And that new approach is to increase the ‘spatial efficiency’ by deploying much smaller cells and effectively reusing of all the spectrum assets of A), and the spectral efficiencies of B), over much smaller areas and user groups.  Therefore, logically, the gain that can be realized using this approach is a factor of ‘N’, if the inter-cell interference can be minimized and if users are clustered in metrocell locations or ‘hotspots’, where N is the number of small cells deployed per macro serving area.  So, N could be 5, 10, 30 or even 100 or more, in the limit. 

Now returning to the predicted demand of the Tablet Generation with 80x growth in demand over the next 5 years, the answer to the capacity equation must be:

Tablet Generation Capacity Demand:

= 2.5x (More spectrum) * 2x (More spectral efficiency) * 16x (More spatial efficiency)

So, the future of wireless is small (cells), but it will drive very, very big behavioral and socio-economic change.

 About the Author

Marcus Weldon is Corporate CTO for Alcatel-Lucent and also a member of Bell Laboratories. In this position he is responsible for co-ordinating the technical strategy across the company and driving technological and architectural innovations into the portfolio. He holds a B.S in Chemistry and Computer Science and a Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University. He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1995, winning several scientific and engineering society awards for his work on electronics and optical materials. In 2000, Dr. Weldon started work on fiber-based Broadband Access technologies and, in 2005, became the CTO for Broadband Solutions business group in Lucent Technologies, with responsibility for wireline access networks and IPTV. He was subsequently appointed as CTO of the Fixed Access Division and the Wireline Networks Product Division in Alcatel-Lucent following the merger of Alcatel and Lucent in December 2006, with responsibility for xDSL and FTTH, IPTV, Home Networking and IMS. He was one of the primary architects behind the evolution of the Triple Play Service Delivery Architecture to the High Leverage Network™, now the widely accepted industry architecture centered around the principles of ‘all IP, converged wireline/wireless, intelligent, optimized networking’. Together with his CTO team he was also a primary driver behind the groundbreaking and multiple award-winning lightRadio™ architecture for next generation wireless networks. He continues to help drive the company in new portfolio directions, including defining new ‘Cloud-networking’ and ‘network as a platform’ paradigms, as well as the use of sophisticated analytics for optimizing the customer experience and service delivery.

About Alcatel-Lucent

The long-trusted partner of service providers, enterprises and governments around the world, Alcatel-Lucent is a leading innovator in the field of networking and communications technology, products and services. The company is home to Bell Labs, one of the world's foremost research centers, responsible for breakthroughs that have shaped the networking and communications industry. Alcatel-Lucent was named one of MIT Technology Review's 2012 Top 50 list of the "World's Most Innovative Companies" for breakthroughs such as lightRadio™, which cuts power consumption and operating costs on wireless networks while delivering lightning fast Internet access. Through such innovations, Alcatel-Lucent is making communications more sustainable, more affordable and more accessible as we pursue our mission - Realizing the Potential of a Connected World. With operations in more than 130 countries and one of the most experienced global services organizations in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach. The Company achieved revenues of Euro 15.3 billion in 2011 and is incorporated in France and headquartered in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on:  http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Alcatel-Lucent Introduces LTE First Responder Video Solution

Alcatel-Lucent introduced a First Responder Video solution that enable emergency teams to view and rapidly share multiple video and data feeds simultaneously on mobile devices using LTE networks.

Alcatel-Lucent's First Responder Video solution leverages Bell Labs' research in multimedia and cloud to optimize bandwidth use and integrate multiple video feeds and other operational data into one single stream to transmit to situation commanders. First Responder Video employs a 'thin client' strategy, which ensures that data processing takes place at the powerful control centers to free up the device itself to focus on receiving and sending images and data. It works seamlessly with existing control center dispatch applications and allows teams to send video and data to many different types of 'smart' mobile devices at the same time.

Philippe Agard, Vice President of Public Safety, Alcatel-Lucent said: "Alcatel-Lucent's First Responder Video capitalizes on our leading capabilities and expertise in mobile broadband solutions to deliver real efficiencies for public safety agencies. The solution has seen great results in a live end-to-end trial with the Policia Militar do Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil, allowing teams to be sent views from in-car cameras. Easy-to-use screens enhance operations in the toughest environments and the ability to maximize available bandwidth to share multiple high-quality video images on a variety of mobile devices maximizes cost of ownership at a time when budgets are being stretched."
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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