THE PAST, PRESENT,

AND FUTURE
OF MOBILE
COMMUNICATIONS
M
any technologies have revolutionized life throughout the history of human-
ity, from the creation of hand tools, to mechanical devices, powered ma-
chines and automated robotic processes and manufacturing. But among
these myriad inventions and discoveries, mobile communications stands
out as a giant in terms of the combined speed of adoption and the extent of the global
transformation it has driven. In about four decades, the technology has reached more
than six billion people, permanently altering lives in ways that no one imagined was
possible in so short a period, and with such global extent. Mobile communications
have made it possible for people to connect and communicate in remote parts of the
......................................... world where even electricity cannot be taken for granted. They provide vast economic
benefits through increased productivity, with estimates of a GDP increase of approxi-
Harish Viswanathan
mately 5% associated with the availability of high speed Internet services, both wired
and Marcus Weldon and wireless. But perhaps most importantly, mobile communications provide a means
to expand knowledge and increase the creativity of people everywhere by making in-
formation available at the touch of a button or icon.
Mobile communications have evolved to this point through countless innovations
that have resulted in massively improved performance and significantly lower cost
with each technology generation. Beginning with the firm theoretical foundations for
communications laid by Claude Shannon in 1948, successive improvements in cellu-
lar technology have been achieved through a combination of advances in communica-
tion theory, computing power, and analog radio frequency (RF) circuit electronics. In
this paper, we chart the course of successive generations of mobile technology
highlighting some of the key innovations resulting in the major performance improve-
ments that have been achieved over the years.
Mobile wireless technology evolution is characterized by “generations” with major
shifts in technology between generations and incremental enhancements within each
generation. In this paper, we begin with a high-level discussion of the key technology
generations starting with the analog cellular systems deployed in the 1980s through
to the 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) system being deployed today. We highlight
the 11 major technical advances that have led to the most significant improvements in
cellular technology and then present a view of the future wireless evolution to the be-
ginning of the 5G era.

The Evolution
Mobile communications originated in first quarter of the last century and went
through successive generations of improvements by the 1970s, as the U.S. Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) allocated additional spectrum to increase capac-
ity over time. Police departments were among the first significant users; in the private
sector, communicating from a vehicle was a luxury available only to a select few. In

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 9
1979, the Bell System Technical Journal reported that
“many telephone companies can cite a long list of held
ordersVunfilled requests for serviceVfrom people who
want to become mobile subscribers [1].”
Since these earliest analog systems were deployed, the
primary industry challenge for mobile wireless systems
has been to maximize the use of spectrum, particularly
the limited amount of low frequency (G 6 GHz) spectrum
that can propagate over longer distances and without line
of sight (LOS) between the transmitter and the receiver.
The need for such spectrum is driven by the desire to pro-
vide ubiquitous coverage, which has been the dominant
requirement for mobile service up until now. Such low
frequency spectrum was, and remains, a scare resource,
so efficient use of spectrum has been a core focus of inno-
vation in wireless technology generations. In addition, pro-
viding acceptable battery life without constant recharging
was (and still is) a challenge, as well as achieving voice
call quality comparable to that of a non-radio telephone
service. However, with the advent of data (web) services,
increasing the capacity of mobile systems has become the
single most important goal, which is driving increased fo-
cus on more complex antenna designs capable of deliver-
ing more bits per second per Hertz (bits/s/Hz), as well as
a move to smaller cells serving a smaller area, allowing a
better signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) to be
delivered, typically to a smaller number of users. We will
discuss all of these dimensions in this paper, as in total
they describe the essence of mobile communications in
the past and the future.
We start with a description of the generic architecture
of cellular systems in order to highlight the key compo-
nents that will be relevant in the following discussion.
Figure 1 shows the essential elements of a cellular
system architecture. Starting from the left, the antenna is
responsible for converting the electrical signal into elec-
tromagnetic waves for transmission, and vice versa for
reception. The radio component generates the signal that
is fed to the antenna on the transmit path and processes
the signal received from the antenna. The radio includes a
diplexer filter to separate the transmission from the
FIGURE 1. Essential elements of a cellular system architecture.
reception, as well as analog/digital converters, a power
amplifier for transmission and low noise amplifier for re-
ception, frequency up-conversion and down-conversion
from the baseband to intermediate and the selected radio
frequencies (RF), and a number of filters to reject out-of-
band interference and to meet the spectral mask require-
ments. In the first implementations, the radio function
was in the same cabinet as the baseband component, but
this led to cable loss (typically 3 dB) between the radio
and the antenna, so in more recent implementations the
radio functions are contained in a remote radio head
(RRH), which is mounted on the tower itself, close to the
antenna. The baseband component includes all the
digital signal processing functions such as modulation/
demodulation, forward error correction coding/decoding,
retransmission, framing, and the layer 2 functions such
as medium access control, and implements the radio
link protocol and power control.
...............................................
The first truly large-scale commercial
cellular mobile system was the AMPS
analog communication system.
The controller component incorporates higher level
control functions such as radio resource allocation to
mobile devices, handoffs between base stations, call pro-
cessing, and packet encapsulation/de-encapsulation. Be-
ginning with the early cellular systems and up to the
third generation, the controller entity was separate from
the base station. In fourth generation Long Term Evolu-
tion (LTE) systems, many of the data path and related
control functions were moved into the base station
(called the eNodeB) with some control plane functions
centralized in a separate controller entity called the mo-
bile management entity (MME).
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TABLE I Comparison of the Essential Attributes of Different Generations of Mobile Technology

.......................................................................................................................................................

The core network component is responsible for sub-
scriber management and acts as the interface to the public
switched telephone network (PSTN) for telephony ser-
vices and to the Internet for data services. For circuit-
switched voice, the core network component is based on
a traditional digital exchange while the packet network is
typically based on a router platform. In addition to per-
forming the basic switching and routing functionality, the
core network components maintain home and visitor
locations to route calls to the appropriate switching/
routing nodes depending on the mobile's location.
Each generation of technology has generally con-
formed to this overall architecture, although significant
capabilities have been added with each generation as we
highlight in the following and summarize in Table I.
Figure 2 shows the historical evolution of different
mobile technologies, starting from the analog communica-
tion systems. Each new generation was driven by a

FIGURE 2. The evolution of cellular technologies over time.

Bell Labs Technical Journal · V O L U M E 1 9

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FIGURE 3. Essential spectrum allocation for AMPS and IS-136 TDMA systems.
combination of major technology advances in the funda-
mental building blocks outlined above in order to better
solve the key challenges of spectrum, spectral efficiency,
coverage, capacity, power consumption, and voice call
quality.
The first truly large-scale commercial cellular mobile
system was the analog communication system called the
Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) [2] in the
United States. It relied on frequency division multiple ac-
cess (FDMA) technology to support multiple voice calls
to the same base station at the same time and was the first
to employ the cellular concept and frequency reuse be-
tween cells. Calls could be assigned to different frequency
channels based on signal strength allowing the same fre-
quency to be reused in various locations without interfer-
ence. The analog technology required 30 KHz of
bandwidth in each direction to support a single voice call
and consequently there was not enough spectrum avail-
able to meet the demand. Figure 3 shows the spectral al-
location for the AMPS system in the A band in the U.S.
...............................................
Due to the better performance of
CDMA compared to TDMA, eventually
all 3G cellular systems adopted
CDMA technology.
Due to the aforementioned limitations, these early ana-
log systems were soon replaced by digital systems. In the
United States, the AMPS system was replaced by digital
cellular systems that were based on Time Division Mul-
tiple Access (TDMA) standardized as IS-54 and then
IS-136 (Figure 2) [3]. In Europe and other parts of the
world, analog systems were replaced by the Global
System for Mobile Communication (GSM) [4], a TDMA-
based system which is still the major wireless communica-
tion standard in many parts of the world due to its wide
deployment and global interoperabilty.
In TDMA systems, time is divided into slots and de-
vices are assigned slots during which they are allowed to
transmit and receive, allowing multiple devices to share
the same bandwidth. TDMA was made possible through
the shift from analog to digital technologies. Voice sam-
ples digitized over a 20 ms period could be stored and
transmitted over a much smaller interval than that required
for sending one sample at a time. The initial TDMA sys-
tems could send three voice streams in the same 30 KHz
bandwidth occupied by one voice stream in the analog
AMPS system. TDMA efficiency was subsequently en-
hanced even further to send six voice streams in the same
bandwidth, a substantial improvement over the analog
systems. TDMA's allocated slots also allowed any packet
data to be sent, not only digitized voice samples, thus al-
lowing for the earliest form of mobile data services.
In parallel to TDMA, Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) [5] based systems were developed and deployed
in the U.S. In CDMA, all devices use the same time-
frequency resources and are separated through so-called
spreading codes. An often-cited analogy to explain
CDMA uses the example of multiple conversations occur-
ring simultaneously in multiple languages. In spite of the
many different conversations around them, a given pair of
people is able to tune out other conversations and under-
stand each other. Similarly, because different spreading
codes are used by different devices, each receiver can iso-
late the signal from a given transmitter. The major advan-
tage of CDMA over TDMA systems was the superior
statistical multiplexing at the radio signal level. Since ev-
ery conversation alternates periods of speaking and listen-
ing with interspersed periods of silence, in TDMA
systems these periods of silence result in wasted resources
since time slots are assigned for entire session. In
CDMA, silence results in less overall interference be-
tween devices, and therefore improved performance, since
lower average interference levels mean that more users
can be accommodated in the same time-frequency re-
source. CDMA was introduced in the U.S. through the
IS-95 [6] standard and due to the better performance of
CDMA compared to TDMA, eventually all third genera-
tion (3G) cellular systems adopted CDMA technology.
Two major standards bodies, the Third Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP) and Third Generation Partner-
ship Project 2 (3GPP2) were created for standardization
of 3G wireless technologies, based on their different 2G
heritages. 3GPP technologies include GSM and its evolu-
tions while 3GPP2 was based on the IS-95 family of stan-
dards. From the third generation (3G) onward, both
V O L U M E 1 9 · Bell Labs Technical Journal
 12
FIGURE 4. Spectrum allocation for 3GPP2 and 3GPP third generation systems.
standards were based on CDMA although the carrier
bandwidth and data rates were different. In the 3GPP
family of standards, the 3G solution, called the Universal
Mobile Telecommunication System [7], leapfrogged 2G
by going to wide bandwidth (5 MHz) and transitioning
from TDMA to CDMA. In 3GPP2, the major enhance-
ment came by using coherent signaling on the reverse
link from the device to the network, as opposed to the
non-coherent signaling used in 2G. Figure 4 illustrates
the 3GPP2 (IS-95/CDMA 2000) and 3GPP (WCDMA)
CDMA band allocations in the U.S.
At the time these 3G cellular systems were being de-
ployed, high speed wireline Internet services were being
broadly deployed in most countries and the value of data
connectivity was becoming increasingly understood. So it
was natural to extend the 3G cellular systems to support
packet data communications. Both 3GPP and 3GPP2 de-
fined technologies for high speed data communications
based on the same basic CDMA waveform and carrier
bandwidth but to achieve high data rates, they employed
time division among the data flows within the cell on
the downlink. The 3GPP2 system for data was called
CDMA EV-DO (CDMA EVolution-Data Only) and the
3GPP system was called High Speed Packet Access
(HSPA), with data rates above 1 Mb/s achievable over
these systems.
FIGURE 5. Typical spectrum usage for a low frequency LTE system.
Bell Labs Technical Journal · V O L U M E 1 9
One of the major disadvantages of both CDMA tech-
nologies was that signals within the same cell, i.e., those
being served by the same base station, interfere with each
other especially on the uplink from the mobiles to the
base station. Furthermore, data traffic is substantially dif-
ferent from voice in that high peak rates are needed but
only for short durations, so resources have to be assigned
and removed quickly depending on whether or not there
is data to send. Orthogonal transmission is more suitable
to meet these requirements and thus Orthogonal Fre-
quency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) was the technol-
ogy selected for 4G, leveraging advances in
computational power that allowed the Fourier transform
processing required for OFDM to be performed at reason-
able cost for the first time for cellular communications.
Another major advance in 4G systems was the move
to wider bandwidths: while CDMA was based on either
1.25 MHz (IS-95) or 5 MHz (UMTS) spectrum bands, 4G
was designed for 10 MHz or 20 MHz carrier bandwidths
for which OFDM results in simpler receiver design com-
pared to CDMA. In addition, multiple antenna transmis-
sion was utilized to improve the throughput by using a
new dimension of “spatial diversity,” for which OFDM is
better suited than CDMA due to the intrinsic orthogonal-
ity. LTE [8], a fourth generation technology, is now the
only major mobile cellular technology standard beyond
 13
3G, since network operators deploying the 3GPP2-based
3G system have also adopted LTE. Significantly higher
data rates are supported in 4G compared to 3G (Table I),
and LTE is now evolving to LTE-Advanced by the inclu-
sion of further enhancements such as carrier aggregation
(CA) and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) processing of
signals which will be covered in more detail below.
Figure 5 shows LTE spectrum allocation for Band 13, the
700 MHz spectrum allocation in which LTE was first de-
ployed in the U.S., based on a regulatory “digital divi-
dend” that freed spectrum previously used for analog TV
broadcast.
A summary of the essential attributes of the different
generations of technology, and the evolution in perfor-
mance that has occurred with each successive generation,
is provided in Table I.
In the following section, we describe the theory and
performance of the underlying essential technologies be-
hind each of these systems in more detail, before looking
forward to what will be the essential ingredients of 5G.
The Eleven Essential Elements
In this section, we review the fundamental technology do-
mains that underlie all of the above, to provide a founda-
tion for understanding the past evolutions, as well as how
the future of wireless communications will be defined.
We identify 11 key technological and architectural con-
cepts that define any wireless system.
1. The Cellular Concept
The first and perhaps the most important concept is the
“cellular concept” which allows “frequency reuse” [9].
This technology was employed in the AMPS system [10]
and resulted in substantially higher capacity relative to the
FIGURE 6. Illustration of frequency reuse and the cellular concept.
single cell systems deployed prior to that. Frequency re-
use refers to the simultaneous use of the same frequency
channel for two different devices to communicate to their
base stations, allowing multiple base stations that are not
immediate neighbors of each other to use the same set of
frequencies to serve their mobile users, thereby signifi-
cantly improving the spectrum utilization.
The area covered by a set of base stations can be natu-
rally be divided into “cells” which demark the area pre-
dominantly being served by each specific base station.
While in reality the shape of the cells depends on the
signal propagation, for planning purposes cells are con-
sidered to be hexagonal since among all tessellating
polygons the hexagonal shape covers a given area with
the least number of cells for a given distance from the
center to the vertex. Frequency reuse is specified by two
integer parameters, say i, j, which describe the spacing
along the two dimensions in a hexagonal grid between
cells that use the same set of frequency channels as illus-
trated in Figure 6. With these parameters, the number of
cells in a given cluster of cells that must use a different
set of frequencies is given by
N ¼ i2 þ ij þ j2 (1)
and, conversely, the distance between the nearest co-
channel cells of radius R (using the same frequency) is
given by
pffiffiffiffiffiffi
D ¼ R 3N : (2)
The signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) de-
creases with D, since the smaller the D, the higher the in-
terference. Thus the design goal is to pick the smallest D
that meets the SINR requirement for the communication,
which in turn determines the smallest N (the smaller the
N the more the frequency is reused by cells, increasing
spectrum utilization).
2. The Digital Concept
The move from analog to digital laid the foundation for
all future innovations since sophisticated compression,
encryption, advanced receiver signal processing, and
channel coding are all possible only with digital commu-
nications. Arguably, the most important benefit of digiti-
zation for wireless communications is in improving
capacity or spectral efficiency. In his landmark 1948 paper
[11, 12], Claude Shannon established the fundamental
limits of communications and proved that a point-to-point
communication system using bandwidth W and receive
power P can achieve a spectral efficiency of
 
C P
¼ log2 1 þ (3)
W N0 W
bits/sec/Hz over an additive white Gaussian noise channel
of noise power spectral density N0. However, achieving
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 14
the promised spectral efficiency requires sophisticated sig-
nal processing and channel coding and decoding tech-
niques that are possible only through digital technology.
To put this in perspective: consider a bandwidth of
30 KHz (the bandwidth used by the AMPS system for a
single voice call) and an SNR of 15 dB (which is lower
than that required by the AMPS system). The maximum
data rate achievable according to the capacity formula is
150 Kb/s which translates to about four voice calls using
the 32 Kb/s voice codec common in AMPS systems. In
contrast, the capacity of the first digital communication
system was three voice calls in 30 KHz of spectrum,
which is equal to three times that of the analog communi-
cation system.
3. The Coding and Decoding Concepts
Achieving high spectral efficiency communication requires
channel coding at the transmitter and decoding at the re-
ceiver. Coding [13] refers to introduction of redundancy in
the transmission in an optimal fashion where information
sequences of a certain “block length” are mapped to se-
quences of channel symbols called “code words.” The
code words are chosen carefully to minimize the probabil-
ity that noise or other channel impairments would cause
decoding errors, i.e., cause the transmitted code word to
appear as a different code word at the receiver. Clearly the
code word error probability depends on the type of decod-
ing employed. One of the major advances in communica-
tions that is widely used in cellular networks is the
invention of low complexity algorithms for maximum
likelihood (ML) decoding. To understand the gain, con-
sider a code book with the set of N code words ~ x1 ; . . .~
xN .
If we assume (without loss of generality) that code word 1
is transmitted and we denote the received signal vector by
~
y, the ML decoder [14] computes the transmitted code
word as
~
x ¼ arg max i Prf~ x1 g
y=~ (4)
where the probability is over the channel noise and fading.
It can be shown that the ML decoder minimizes the proba-
bility of decoding error.
Brute force computation of the above maximization is
not practical since the number of code words is very
large, but the Viterbi decoder [15] provides an algorithm
for iteratively computing the most likely code word for a
class of codes called “convolutional codes” that are
widely used in 2G and 3G cellular systems. More re-
cently a new class of codes called turbo codes [16] was
invented, providing almost 3 dB improvement in SINR
for the same data rate. These codes are used in HSPA and
also LTE systems. Furthermore, these systems implement
adaptive coding and modulation, where the extent of cod-
ing redundancy and the number of bits per modulation
symbol are adjusted according to channel quality feed-
back from the receiver.
Bell Labs Technical Journal · V O L U M E 1 9
4. The Control of Power
One of the key factors that determine the amount of inter-
ference a device causes to neighboring cells using the
same frequency is the transmission power level, which
also dictates the quality of the received signal, especially
in a fading environment. In low frequency (G 6 GHz)
wireless communications, the transmitted signal bounces
off multiple objects (scatterers) resulting in the signal trav-
eling over multiple propagation paths that add construc-
tively or destructively at the receiver depending on the
phase of each signal component. This phenomenon is
known as multipath fading and can result in “deep fade,”
i.e., a major reduction in SNR because of destructive
combination of signals. If the transmission power is main-
tained at a constant level when the communication chan-
nel is in a deep fade, then the received signal to noise
ratio is low, whereas if the channel is good then sufficient
SNR is achieved. Hence in the original 2G systems, trans-
mission power was set high enough to receive the signal
at good SNR even in a deep fade. However, this con-
sumes excess power and also results in higher levels of
interference, resulting in less frequency reuse. The advent
of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) introduced
closed loop power control [17] which allowed the trans-
mit power to be set based on instantaneous (within a few
ms) feedback from the receiver. The transmit power is in-
creased or decreased, depending on whether the SINR is
below or above the target, so the minimum amount of
power required to compensate for the instantaneous fad-
ing and interference conditions is transmitted, and the
overall interference minimized. This power control also
addressed the well-known “near-far problem” in CDMA
where the signal from devices close to the base station
will drown the signal from devices further away if both
transmit at the same power.
5. The Code Division Multiple Access/Interference
Averaging Concept
As explained earlier, initial digital cellular systems were
based on TDMA and FDMA, with each device using a
dedicated frequency and time resource within each cell to
communicate with the base station. The frequency reuse in
these systems was determined by the worst-case interfer-
ence which occurs when a particular channel is assigned to
a device at the edge of the central cell and that channel is
also assigned to a user that is closest to the same central cell
base station but located in a co-channel cell. Note that this
may happen only some of the time since the co-channel cell
may assign this particular frequency channel to a device
that is located anywhere within its cell, which could very
well be the furthest point in that cell from the central cell.
Thus the design does not incorporate any interference analy-
sis or intelligence and is therefore, by definition, inefficient.
In contrast, CDMA systems assign the entire band-
width to all the devices and instead achieve separation
among users through “spreading.” Spreading is the
 15
process of taking a narrowband signal and increasing its
bandwidth by one or two orders of magnitude by expand-
ing each symbol into multiple symbols with a pseudo ran-
dom sequence called the spreading code. This spreading
code is unique to each device's signal and hence the pro-
cess of “despreading” suppresses interference from the
signals of all other transmitters.
CDMA systems employ universal frequency reuse; the
same bandwidth is used in all the cells at the same time.
A major benefit of this approach is that the performance
is no longer limited by worst case interference. Instead,
the SINR limiting factor is the average interference from
all transmissions in neighboring cells, enabling better uti-
lization of available spectrum and thus increasing spectral
efficiency.
Mathematically, the number of users at rate R that can
be supported by a CDMA system with bandwidth W and
required SINR  is approximately given by
 
W 1
KCDMA  1 þ (5)
R ð1 þ Þ
where  is the ratio of out-of-cell interference to in-cell
interference and is typically 0.85. On the other hand, a
TDMA system has a capacity of
 
W 1
KTDMA  (6)
R NðÞ
where NðÞ is the reuse cluster size which in turn de-
pends on the target SINR . In typical cellular systems
ð1 þ Þ G NðÞ, resulting in higher CDMA capacity
than TDMA capacity. Other benefits of CDMA include a
lower device peak power requirement, simpler inter-
symbol interference mitigation in the presence of multi-
path propagation, and support for soft handoffs. However,
CDMA suffers from intra-cell interference which can be
avoided by using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multi-
plexing (OFDM) as described below.
6. The OFDM Concept
Frequency division multiplexing generally requires so-
called “guard bands” between the signals on the different
frequency blocks. This is because time-limited, causal sig-
nals cannot have finite bandwidth and so the transmitted
signal will leak outside the intended band. OFDM elimi-
nates the need for such guard bands between the different
signals from the same transmitter by using the concept of
orthogonality. The signal is modulated in the time domain
using sinusoids with frequencies that are shifts of the
same basic frequency that is chosen to be the inverse of
the duration of the symbol, results in orthogonal fre-
quency elements. Each such frequency-shifted sinusoid is
called a “tone” or a “subcarrier.” This results in no inter-
ference between the signals even without a guard band
since all interfering signals have a null in the frequency
response at the peak of desired signal response.
Mathematically, the OFDM baseband signal of symbol
duration T with N subcarriers can be represented as
X
N 1
2
xðtÞ ¼ an e j T nt (7)
n¼0
where an is the information symbol corresponding to
the nth subcarrier. Similarly the information symbols can
be recovered from the Fourier transform of the received
signal over the symbol duration as illustrated by the
equation
ZT
xðtÞe j T nt dt:
2
an ¼ (8)
0
The structure of the transmitter and receiver processing
are essentially Fourier transforms, which can now be im-
plemented digitally through well known fast Fourier
transform (FFT) algorithms.
In cellular systems, OFDM is used on the downlink
from the base station to the different mobiles with the
different groups of subcarriers carrying information for
different mobiles. This is called Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) since multiple users
are served simultaneously. On the uplink, different mo-
biles transmit on different sets of subcarriers. To main-
tain the orthogonality, devices are synchronized through
closed loop timing advance mechanisms, and thus intra-
cell interference is eliminated. In order to minimize the
synchronization requirement, a cyclic prefix is intro-
duced so that the samples of a symbol are extended by
repetition. This allows different receivers to recover the
symbol from different windows of the samples. At the
same time the cyclic prefix helps prevent inter-symbol
interference caused by multiple copies or echoes of the
received signal due to path reflections.
7. The MIMO Concept
With digital cellular systems employing advanced signal
processing and coding, squeezing more out of the spec-
trum required a new dimension. The use of multiple an-
tennas, i.e., the spatial dimension, to separate signals that
use the same spectrum and time resources was the major
innovation of the 1990s to squeeze more out of the avail-
able spectrum. Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO)
was invented at Bell Labs [18] and has since become a
part of mobile cellular systems.
In MIMO systems, multiple antennas are employed at
both the transmitter and the receiver. Hence the channel
between the transmitter and receiver becomes a “vector
channel”. The information symbols or code symbols can
be split into multiple streams and each stream sent by a
single antenna. A different linear combination of the sig-
nals from the different transmit antennas is then received
at each of the receiver antennas. The linear combination
V O L U M E 1 9 · Bell Labs Technical Journal
 16

is different on each receive antenna because the channel

fading that modifies the amplitude and phase of the sig-
nal is unique to each pair of transmit and receive anten-
nas. If the number of receive antennas exceeds the
number of independent streams, there are a sufficient
number of linear combinations from which to recover
the transmitted signal by using channel or matrix inver-
sion. However, receiver noise is also affected by the
channel inversion and can potentially increase the noise
power. Nevertheless, it has been shown that there is a net
(substantial) capacity benefit and in fact the capacity as-
ymptotically increases linearly with the increasing num-
ber of transmit and receive antennas.
The basic formula for channel capacity can be ex-
tended to the MIMO case to determine the capacity of the
MIMO channel for a given number of transmit and re-
ceive antennas and SNR under standard fading condi- FIGURE 7. MIMO channel capacity as a function of the number of
tions. The capacity per unit bandwidth is given by [19] antennas.
 
P þ
CMIMO ¼ log det I þ HH
MN0 W M receivers. Rather than sending x, if the transmitter
X NÞ 
minðM;
P
 sends G1 x then the signal received at the M receivers
¼ log 1 þ n 2
(9) (in the absence of noise) will be ðG1 GxÞ ¼ x. In prac-
MN0 W
n¼1 tice, the transmitter will compute a more sophisticated in-
verse to minimize noise enhancement.
where H is the M  N matrix of channels between the M
This approach holds particular promise for TDD sys-
transmit antennas and the N receive antennas and 2n ; n ¼
tems which use the same frequency resources for both the
1 . . . minðM; NÞ are the non-zero eigenvalues of the ma-
uplink and downlink, since the uplink intrinsically pro-
trix HHþ . In the limit of high signal to noise ratios, the
vides information on the downlink channel, allowing effi-
capacity per unit bandwidth can be approximated as:
cient determination of the channel matrix, in contrast to
 
P the FDD case where separate frequency spectrum is used
CMIMO  minðM; NÞ log (10) for the downlink and the uplink, so the downlink channel
N0 W
state must be sent separately over the uplink channel, con-
which shows that indeed the capacity grows linearly with suming significant uplink channel resources.
the number of antennas.
Figure 7 shows the capacity of a MIMO channel with 8. The Small Cell Concept
the same number of transmit and receive antennas at Cell splitting has been one of the major ways in which cel-
10 dB SNR. As can be see from the figure, the capacity lular network capacity has been increased over the last few
increases linearly with the number of antennas. In prac- decades. More than a thousand fold increase in capacity
tice, the number of antennas on a device is limited to since the dawn of cellular communications can be attributed
about two, which in principle limits the MIMO gain. to decreasing macro cell sizes through cell splitting. How-
However, an extension of this approach that involves ever, a relatively new concept called “smallcells,” which re-
multiplexing streams for different users on different anten- fers to deployment of low power base stations with small
nas can achieve the large gains promised by multiple an- cell radii within the footprint of larger macrocells, has re-
tennas, even if each device only has a few antennas. This cently emerged to drive further capacity enhancements. In a
approach of serving multiple users using the same time small cell architecture, both a macrocell and a small cell
and frequency resources separated by antenna processing provide coverage to the same area, with the small cell de-
is called “Multi-User MIMO” [20]. ployed under the macro “umbrella” to increase capacity to
Importantly, this concept requires that the transmitter a smaller area or traffic “hotspot.” Small cells are also de-
know the channel and apply precoding so that the re- ployed in locations where the macrocell does not provide
ceivers do not see interference from streams not intended sufficient signal strength, for example, in indoor locations
for them. This can be understood through the following such as in homes and offices, for which the macro signal is
simplified analysis: Denote by G the M  M channels too attenuated by the physical infrastructure (walls) to pro-
between the M transmit antennas and M single antenna vide the required capacity and coverage.
terminals and denote by x the M  1 vector of coded in- Small cells are classified according to their transmit
formation signals that the transmitter needs to send to the power and capacity into femtocells, enterprise femtocells,

Bell Labs Technical Journal · V O L U M E 1 9

 17
FIGURE 8. Heterogeneous network with indoor (home and enterprise) small cells and (outdoor) metro small cells under an umbrella of macrocells.
metro cells, and picocells and their power ranges from
100 milliWatts to 5 Watts. They have emerged as a key
component of the cellular evolution for the following
reasons:
· With the high density of macrocells already deployed,
it is difficult to find sites to deploy additional macro-
cells as this involves a substantial amount of equip-
ment including a climate-controlled cabinet for
baseband processing, and separate remote radio heads.
On the other hand, all-in-one small form factor cells
that can be deployed on lamp posts or other street in-
frastructure are an attractive option to increase capac-
ity in areas of significant demand.
· While the macrocell splitting approach is useful to in-
crease capacity over a large area, a small cell can be de-
ployed to increase capacity in a very small area at a
lower cost, essentially providing hotspot capacity. Ex-
amples of such high density areas are shopping malls,
transportation hubs, campuses, sports arenas, and com-
mercial districts.
· For most buildings, providing indoor cellular capacity
using conventional distributed antenna systems (which
are comprised of coax or fiber runs to antennas distrib-
uted throughout the building and an outdoor-to-indoor
base station relay of the macrocell signal) is too expen-
sive. Deploying small cells throughout a building and
leveraging traditional IP/Ethernet packet networks as
backhaul to the core network component is an attractive
prospect from a cost and performance standpoint.
· Small cells are also attractive when utilizing higher fre-
quency spectrum, such as 2.6 GHz to 3.5 GHz and even
more so for “millimeter wave” spectrum at 9 20 GHz as
the more significant atmospheric attenuation naturally
imposes a distance limit on the order of tens to hundreds
of meters, at acceptable transmit powers.
Figure 8 illustrates a heterogeneous environment in a
dense urban scenario where outdoor metro cells and
indoor home and enterprise small cells are deployed in
the footprint of a 3G/4G macro network.
9. The Self-Organizing Network Concept
The self-organizing network (SON) concept refers to ca-
pabilities that allow a variety of operational tasks such as
configuration and optimization of a mobile network to be
performed automatically using software algorithms, rather
than just being manually configured (with a “set and for-
get” approach) as they typically are today.
SON includes three primary dimensions: self-
configuration, self-optimization and self-healing, which
can be summarized as follows:
· Self-configuration involves setting the parameters for
the base station and other radio network elements at the
time the cell is deployed and commissioned. Examples
include automatically assigning physical cell identity to
base stations and discovering neighboring base stations
to form the neighbor relation list needed for handoffs.
· Self-optimization involves adjusting parameters that en-
hance live network performance such as improving ca-
pacity through load balancing between neighboring
cells, reducing call drops during handoffs, interference
management, and adjusting antenna tilt and base
station power to maximize capacity and coverage.
Self-optimization also includes dynamically modifying
parameters to maximize network efficiency as conditions
change over time.
· Self-healing refers to detecting service outages or equip-
ment failure, performing root cause analysis, and auto-
matically correcting for identified network issues. For
example, when a base station fails, the transmit power
and electronic tilts of surrounding base stations can be
automatically adjusted to fill the coverage hole left by
the failed base station.
The major benefit of SON is the reduction of operational
expenses (OpEx) for network operators in the initial
V O L U M E 1 9 · Bell Labs Technical Journal
 18
FIGURE 9. Illustration of a typical SON system.
installation and commissioning phase and during net-
work operation (allowing optimization of the network
efficiency), as well as in recovering from failures of the
network. In addition, self-optimization of the network
through load balancing, for example, also improves the
end user experience by balancing the throughput allo-
cated to different users during times when the network is
congested. SON is also an important enabler for small
cells since a large number of small cells will have to be
deployed to provide the required capacity and coverage,
and traditional manual deployment and management
methods are too labor-intensive and expensive to make
this tractable.
Figure 9 shows the essential SON architecture. SON
systems consist of three major functional components:
1) Harvesting near real time information from measure-
ments taken at mobile devices and base stations; 2) Pro-
cessing the information in an algorithm to obtain
improved settings, and 3) Modifying the controllable pa-
rameters either directly or through an element manage-
ment system. SON systems may be distributed or
centralized since one or the other may be better suited for
a given use case.
10. The Interference Avoidance Concept
In third and fourth generation cellular systems, all base
stations use all the available frequencies and in turn the
device treats signal transmissions from surrounding base
stations as noise (“out-of-cell interference”), resulting in
degradation to the SINR. So, as link spectral efficiencies
approach the maximum theoretical limit (including the
Bell Labs Technical Journal · V O L U M E 1 9
use of multiple antennas), attention has shifted to mitiga-
tion of this out-of-cell interference. Interference avoidance
refers to coordination of transmissions from different base
stations so the set of simultaneous transmissions in any
scheduling interval is chosen to minimize interference
with other transmissions [21, 22]. For example, when mo-
biles are close to the base stations in different cells, the
different base stations can transmit simultaneously using
the same time and frequency blocks since the devices ex-
perience only minimal interference from surrounding cells.
However, transmitting to mobiles at the cell edge will re-
quire using different time or frequency blocks since these
devices will be more affected by surrounding cell trans-
missions. This example scenario is illustrated in Figure 10.
The idea behind interference avoidance or “coordi-
nated scheduling” can be best understood through the
following simplified capacity comparison between simul-
taneous transmission and separate transmission. Using
the Shannon capacity formula, the total capacity for in-
terfering transmit/receive pairs using the same time-fre-
quency resources simultaneously can be written as
 
h1 P
Csimul ¼ W log 1 þ
g 1 P þ N0 W
 
h2 P
þ W log 1 þ (11)
g2 P þ N0 W
where hi , i ¼ 1, 2 is the channel gain from the desired
transmitter to the receiver and gi , i ¼ 1, 2 is the channel
gain from the interfering transmitter to the receiver. For
simplicity, we have assumed that both transmitters
 19
FIGURE 10. Interference avoidance concept: users close to their base stations are assigned the same frequency (red) while users close to neighbor-
ing cells are assigned separate frequencies (blue and green).
transmit at power P and that the receivers have noise
power N0. As can be seen from the equation, the interfer-
ence power is added to the noise power to calculate the
SINR. On the other hand, the total capacity when the two
transmissions are scheduled at different times is given by
   
1 h1 P 1 h2 P
Cseparate ¼ W log 1þ þ W log 1þ : (12)
2 N0 W 2 N0 W
The half in the sum reflects the fact that only half of the
time is available for each transmission when the transmis-
sions are separated in time. Whether Csimul or Cseparate is
larger depends on the relative values of hi , gi , and
P=N0 W. Simultaneous transmission is superior for small
P=N0 W or gi whereas the opposite is true if P=N0 W and
gi are large. Conceptually, interference avoidance or coor-
dinated scheduling techniques try to determine whether a
pair of links should be scheduled simultaneously or sepa-
rately depending on which capacity is larger.
Referring back to small cells (concept 8, above), inter-
ference avoidance is especially useful when small cells are
deployed as shown, under the footprint of the macrocell.
In this case, LTE adds the notion of almost blank sub-
frames (ABS) in which the macro transmissions are sup-
pressed to facilitate small cell transmissions during these
intervals. This is called enhanced inter-cell interference co-
ordination (eICIC), due to the coordination between
macrocells and small cells for interference avoidance.
11. The Coordinated Multi-Point Processing (CoMP)
Concept
The last concept that will be utilized in the near future to
truly optimize (minimize) interference across cells is to
jointly process (as opposed to just coordinate) signals
from multiple cells [23]. Essentially, the different cell
transmissions are treated as multiple antenna transmis-
sions from a single “super cell” that is employing multi-
user MIMO, as discussed earlier (concept 7). In this way,
signals are transmitted to the receiver from more than one
cell in such a way that it does not interfere with other si-
multaneous transmissions to other receivers. As in multi-
user MIMO, channel knowledge is required at the joint
transmitter site to perform precoding, i.e., ensure different
users' signals do not interfere with each other. Because
signal strength decays rapidly with distance, only the few
cells that are closest to each mobile device need to jointly
process the signals for that device, making joint process-
ing somewhat practical. Nevertheless, the backhaul re-
quirements for joint processing are rather stringent. Each
antenna signal needs to be sampled at a sampling rate
roughly twice that of the signal bandwidth and with suffi-
cient precision (for example, 16 bits) and then sent from
the base station to a central processing entity where the
signals can be jointly processed. This requirement equates
to about 1 Gb/s per sector for LTE per 20 MHz carrier,
which essentially implies that some form of WDM opti-
cal communications technology will be required for a
multi-carrier, multi-sector cell site. Furthermore, there are
stringent delay requirements between the cell site and the
central processing (around 100 microseconds) so retrans-
missions can be sent on time.
So the question is whether the gains from CoMP are
sufficient to support the complexity. Simulations show
CoMP can result in about an 80% increase in sector
throughput and more than a factor of 2 in cell edge
throughput on the uplink for typical macrocell systems.
Downlink CoMP gains are more modest, with less than
30% improvement expected in cell throughput, primarily
because of the difficulty of feeding downlink channel in-
formation back to the transmitter in real time and with
V O L U M E 1 9 · Bell Labs Technical Journal
 20
FIGURE 11. Fundamental evolution dimensions for wireless systems
and the anticipated gain/enhancements for 5G systems (multipliers
shown for each dimension), relative to LTE-Advanced architectures.
sufficient precision, in frequency division duplexing
(FDD) systems.
Looking Forward: The Future of Wireless
If we look at the eleven concepts that are foundational to
wireless systems that we outlined above, we can reduce
the dimensions of any wireless communication system to
three primary dimensions: spectrum availability, spectral
efficiency, and spatial efficiency as illustrated in Figure 11,
(though we note that some aspects of self-organizing net-
works are an exception, such as self-healing targeted at re-
ducing operational expenses). Simply put, the goal is
always to use whatever spectrum is available, in the most
spectrally efficient way possible, with the maximum
amount of spectrum reuse (which equates to spatial effi-
ciency). Together these dimensions will yield the most
bits per sec per Hertz to each user. These dimensions can
be viewed as complementary in many ways; for example,
one can reduce the amount of spectrum used by increas-
ing the spectrum efficiency, or by reusing the same spec-
trum over and over again over smaller areas. Or one can
increase the amount of spectrum available by going to
higher frequencies (9 6 GHz), which, due to the shorter
propagation distances, requires the use of smaller cells
which are the foundational element for spatial efficiency.
Looking forward to 5G, these will again be the key di-
mensions for innovation. In this section, we provide our
prediction on the elements most likely to define 5G. The
industry is awash with numerous papers making different
predictions about 5G, and no doubt, ours differ from
those of the others in some aspects. We see the following
changes (evolutions) along these three key dimensions as
well as a fourth “system” dimension:
1) Spectrum. We can expect a 2X increase in spectrum in
the “low band” below 6 GHz, and a 10X increase in
the amount of spectrum by going to the “high band”
above 6 GHz. Higher frequencies between 10 GHz
and 30 GHz and millimeter wave frequencies between
Bell Labs Technical Journal · V O L U M E 1 9
30 GHz and 80 GHz are seen as good candidates for
this new spectrum band as large swathes of spectrum
are available, most of which is lightly licensed or unli-
censed. However, this new spectrum can only be lever-
aged by small cells since there is significantly more
propagation loss in the higher bands due to atmo-
spheric absorption and scattering, with typical propaga-
tion distances of 30 to 100 meters. Nevertheless, when
combined with a small cell architecture, and in well-
defined environments (e.g., in-building), such spectrum
will likely be a key part of the 5G specification.
2) Spectral Efficiency. We can expect a spectral effi-
ciency improvement of 1.5X to 2X in the lower bands
(G 6 GHz) in the future. This will arise through use of
multiple antennas in arrays with joint processing, al-
lowing MU-MIMO and CoMP gains. The increase in
spectral efficiency will primarily be in the low bands
(G 6 GHz), since in the high band the increased num-
ber of antennas will primarily be used to improve the
link budget by beam forming. Furthermore, hardware
performance/cost limitations will not allow the sophisti-
cated digital MIMO techniques needed to achieve high
spectral efficiencies in the high frequency bands. An-
other dimension of spectral efficiency will be to allow
better utilization of spectrum for machine to machine
(M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and
support infrequent “small data” transfers with long bat-
tery life requirements. This will drive the use of new
waveforms (e.g., modified OFDM) which can be de-
ployed with less stringent synchronization require-
ments, allowing relaxation of the (frequent) timing
synchronization signaling.
3) Spatial Efficiency. We can also expect a very dense
network resulting in a spatial efficiency improvement
of 5X to 10X in order to support reuse over smaller
geographic areas/cells and wherever there is substantial
demand for high capacity. In addition, since propaga-
tion distances will be small in the high bands, as men-
tioned above, many cells will also be required to
provide seamless coverage in these bands in both in-
door and outdoor environments.
4) System Efficiency. The fourth dimension of improve-
ment will be on the overall “systems efficiency” that
will be delivered in domains beyond the radio access
network (RAN) by leveraging the concepts of software
defined networking (SDN) and network functions vir-
tualization (NFV). There is potential to substantially
improve the user's mobile experience by enabling the
network to adapt to user needs and applications by dy-
namically creating, changing, and (re)connecting the
network configuration. Additional system efficiency
will be driven by utilizing all spectral bands and all
technologies (e.g., legacy 3G and LTE, WiFi/WiGig,
and new 5G interfaces) simultaneously to create a
“cell-less” user experience, with applications and ser-
vices continuously delivered over the optimal radio
 21
resources available. Finally, overall energy consump-
tion will be a key component of network operating
cost, and this needs to be optimized/minimized at an
overall systems level to drive the desired economics.
Conclusions
The wireless technologies of today barely resemble the
first mobile wireless systems that were initially deployed
thirty years ago. At the same time, a common thread runs
through the systemsVit is about maximizing the use of
spectrum to deliver an ever-increasing amount of voice
and data at lower costs. In this paper, we have highlighted
the path that mobile wireless technology has traversed
over the years and briefly discussed what we believe to
be the eleven foundational concepts that drove the major
advances that have shaped mobile systems to be what
they are today. It is clear that looking back at the essen-
tial basic technologies of the past gives a perspective on
how some of the technologies emerging today will come
together to create the network of the futureVthe 5G net-
work. From this vantage point, the future of wireless
looks at least as exciting as the past, and will undoubtedly
transform lives yet again, by allowing the connection of
massive numbers of people and things with seemingly
limitless capacity, anywhere, anytime.
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(Manuscript approved June 2014)
Authors
Harish Viswanathan is a CTO Partner in the Alcatel-Lucent
Corporate Chief Technology Officer (CTO) organization.
He received a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of
Technology, Chennai, India and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees
in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York. He was the recipient of the Sage Fellowship
at Cornell. Since joining Bell Labs, Dr. Viswanathan has
worked on multiple antenna technology for cellular wire-
less networks, network optimization, network architecture,
mesh networking, and M2M communications. His re-
search interests include communication theory, network-
ing, and information theory. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Marcus Weldon is President of Bell Labs and Chief Tech-
nology Officer for Alcatel-Lucent. He is responsible for
harnessing the power of Bell Labs to address the biggest
technical challenges in information and communications
technology, for coordinating technical strategy across the
company, and for driving technological and architectural
innovations into the portfolio. He was named CTO of
Alcatel-Lucent’s Fixed Access Division and Wireline Net-
works Product Division following the merger of the two
companies in 2006. Prior to that, he was CTO of the
Lucent Technologies’ Broadband Solutions business
group. Dr. Weldon began his career at AT&T Bell Labs
as a postdoctoral member of technical staff, winning sev-
eral scientific and engineering awards for his work on
electronics and optical materials. He received a B.Sc. in
chemistry from King’s College, London, and a Ph.D. in
physical chemistry from Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. t
V O L U M E 1 9 · Bell Labs Technical Journal