Radio Challenges, Architectures, and Design Considerations for Wireless Infrastructure: Creating the Core Technologies That Connect People Around the World

Within a relatively short period of time, we have seen five distinct generations of cellular technology roll out, with each delivering enhancements in terms of quality of service (QoS) while at the same time enabling new features and services, as highlighted in Figure 1. Every successive generation of wireless standards has introduced advances in data-carrying capacity and reliable low latency as well as different use cases. At first glance, we may expect that the evolution is driven by the insatiable and ever-increasing demand for capacity, where a year-on-year growth of global mobile network data traffic is in excess of 40% [1]. The traffic growth is primarily driven by both the rising number of smartphones and subscriptions and an increasing average data volume per subscription. However, as we start to look deeper, we see a much more intricate set of requirements and complexities that intertwine: the applications, technical requirements, and radio technology developments. The evolution could not have happened were it not enabled by a parallel evolution in cellular base station technology to support more spectrum, better spectral efficiency, and network densification.