4G Transition Components

Some of the 4G transition components in brief are:

• Multi-Antenna Systems: To foster the growing data rate needs of 4G, deploying multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver.
• Software Defined Radio (SDR): SDR is one form of Open Wireless Architecture (OWA). Since 4G is the collection of wireless standards, the final form of the 4G device will constitute all standards. SDR Technology offers one possible realization.
• Smart antennas and beam forming: These offer a significantly improved solution to reduce interference levels and improve the system capacity. With this technology, each user's signal is transmitted and received by the base station only in the direction of that particular user. This drastically reduces the overall interference in the system.
• Adaptive Modulation and Coding Techniques: The modulation and coding techniques change according to the network resource, user requirement and physical channel conditions.
• Access Schemes: The scarce resource frequency and network infrastructure is accessed using the channel accessing schemes. The existing wireless standards use TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access). FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access). CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and combinations of these. Recently, new access schemes like OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access) and MC-CDMA (Multi Carrier CDMA System) gained more importance in 802.16e and 802.20 standards.
• IPv6: It is generally believed that 4th generation wireless networks would support great number of wireless devices that are addressable and routable. Therefore in the context of 4G, IPv6 is an important network layer technology and standard that can support great number of wireless enabled devices. In addition to increasing the number of IP addresses, IPv6 also removes the need for Network Address Translation (NAT)—atechnique used in 3G and other networks to make private IP addresses work with Internet applications. In the context of 4G, IPv6 also enables a number of applications with better multi-cast, security and route optimization capabilities. With the available address space and number of addressing bits in IPv6, many innovative coding schemes can be developed for 4G devices and applications that could aid deployment of 4G networks and services.
• Mesh Networks: A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. If one node can no longer operate, all the rest can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. Mesh networks work well when the nodes are located at scattered points that do not lie near a common line