The new antenna presented in London this year could be reduced 100 times the energy consumption of mobile communications if it’s used in multiples of one hundred. In practice, replacing a single tower with hundreds of small transmitters, it would consume only 1% greater energy required from the antenna to get the same quality of service. But this is only the beginning.

The aim of the consortium, founded a year ago at the initiative of the legendary Bell Labs-Lucent Aleatel and now part of a forty public and private research centers, is to introduce by 2015 a series of “key elements” that can increase dramatically the efficiency of communications networks.

It’s an ambitious goal but not impossible to achieve. GreenTouch collects the best of global know-how, laboratories of private companies, even competitors – such as Huawei, Samsung. Swisscom and Telefonica and public research, such as that conducted by the University of Cambridge and the Tsinghua University.

All over the world the users of mobile phones are growing, data and video application’s explosion are generating an unprecedented wave of data traffic. The transport of large quantities of bits are now the rule even in mobile networks and then on the radio link with a data traffic doubles every year. In the near future additional scenarios are making big changes: Cloud computing with the distribution of users, applications, data, computing resources and storage. Without radical action mobile phone energy consumption will become a problem.

At present there is no real uniform radio mesh. This will waste a lot of energy, which would be saved if the networks were more homogeneous.

The IEEE organization is working to define a standard for vertical handover, the 802-21 between Wi-Fi, WiMax and 3G/4G. The horizontal handover is already used and is the transition from one cell to another within the same network (or between different networks using the same technology, such as in roaming).
Recently, efforts have multiplied between operators, academics and experts to reach a vertical handover efficiently managing to talk to different technologies. The reason is that there is an urgent need: in all developed countries the broadband mobile networks show signs of saturation. A remedy, already adopted in some countries (USA, Japan, United Kingdom) are the femtocell (small cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home) and picocell (wireless communication system typically covering a small area, such as in-building ) which installed by the user, are used to relieve the main operator (macrocell). In recent days, there was a historical overtaking in the United States: the number of femtocells has exceeded the number of the macrocell.

The weaknesses of this solution are the cost of the equipment and the need to have adequate backhaul (ie a fast connection to the rest of the network;now it happens through adsl-dsl). So it would be useful relieves traffic of mobile users on the wi-fi hot spot if they are present.The hot spots are in fact connected to a wired network, where bandwidth is less poor than mobile.

How it vertical handover works: software on the pc ’s user knows when there is a sufficient Wi-Fi signal, in that case it moves the connection on the network. Otherwise it uses the mobile network through UMTS/4G/3G air cards connected to a PC.
The challenge of the algorithm is to maintain a stable connection as the user moves from one network to another: this is the vertical handover. You do not realize they have switched from Wi-Fi to 3G or the opposite continuing to navigate normally. It can use any Wi-Fi hot spot that is authorized to have access. To succeed they had to overcome two problems of vertical handover: wi-fi delays authentication and the ping pong, the risk of passing continuously from one network to another when the Wi-Fi signal is weak. The paradox: wi-fi was always considered by operators the enemy that could undermine the boom in mobile data traffic. The boom is arrived, too strong, and now they go to the Wi-Fi to get help.

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Information, including voice, begin to travel in the form of data packets. A revolution, very expensive: Telia Sonera, at the moment the only Lte operator, have launched it in Stockholm and Oslo, respectively with Ericsson and Huawei. Telia Sonera estimate a cost of 70 million euros to cover another 28 cities in 2010 in Sweden and Norway. Companies must rebuild from scratch the mobile network, with its various systems. Given the costs, it is unthinkable that operators pass to Lte suddenly: they will do so gradually, maintaining at the same time GSM and UMTS / HSPA.
UMTS and / or GSM netowork will remain for some years the only standard supported by most of the cell phones. Ericsson also has multi-standard equipment (it is the first networking vendor in the world, Huawei is the second). Qualcomm has introduced dual-mode chip.

It is urgent to increase the capacity of cells, because the mobile traffic will increase more than sevenfold in the world between 2010 and 2014, according to GSA. The Lte offers greater speed (100 Mbps), lower latency but also lower operating costs: 4G network will work with IP protocol, it needs fewer devices, which are also more advanced and therefore consume less (10 – 20%) also they have a better intelligent traffic management system. A network test made by Ericsson in Stockholm, presented in early May 2010, shows that the performance of Lte are greater than ADSL 2 Plus (20 Mbps), Huawei has shown instead, in Shanghai in late May, some Lte 4g applications: 3D games, high definition IPTV (1080p). From 2011-2012 there will be the first networks TD-LTE (Time Division) while the current is Fd (frequency division, more adapted to the voice). The TD-LTE, shown for its first time at 2010 Shanghai China Mobile Expo, can add up the frequencies in the downlink and uplink , to double the bandwidth.

From late 2009, the industry works at Advanced Lte at 300/100 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps in terms of reduced mobility (as shown by Huawei in March, in the laboratory). Benefits are possible thanks to new functions, such as carriers, and spectrum aggregation (aggregates resources different wireless), the Comp (Coordinated multipoint transmission the user connects to multiple base stations at once) and better Mime download (multiple smart antennas).
From 2015 we will see the first phones cloud, that will do everything via the Internet, will be the first to launch them Huawei and ZTE, while today only Samsung (SCH-r900) and HTC Evo 4G has announced a LTE phone.

4G Lte networks start in Usa around the end of 2010 with Centurytel, Metro PCS, Verizon Wireless, Cox Comms and in Canada with Telus and Bell Canada.