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A wireless industry consortium is developing a new technology called MulteFire that it says delivers the high performance of 4G LTE cellular networks while being as easy to deploy as Wi-Fi routers, according to reports.
Marcus Weldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs and chief technology officer of Nokia, laid out his vision for MulteFire during a meeting at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey last week, according to an IEEE Spectrum report.
As Weldon sees it, managers of industrial facilities will be the primary customers for MulteFire and will want to use it to connect millions of devices for oil and gas drilling, power transmission, and manufacturing.
“No consumers are saying, ‘Damnit, give me MulteFire!’” he says. “Or at least, I haven’t found one yet. But some industries are.”
Rather than relying on the licensed spectrum purchased for today’s LTE service, MulteFire operates entirely in the unlicensed 5 gigahertz band. And to set it up, users would simply need to install MulteFire access points, similar to Wi-Fi access points, at any facility served by optical fiber or wireless backhaul.
Once installed, MulteFire would provide greater capacity, range, and coverage than Wi-Fi, because it’s based on advanced LTE standards. But by operating in unlicensed spectrum, MulteFire could conserve resources for companies struggling to meet customers’ data demands.
Depending on how MulteFire is used, it could let cellular companies offload traffic to unlicensed spectrum, or allow factory owners to set up private MulteFire networks to serve equipment, robots, and IoT devices.
The technology is being developed by the MulteFire Alliance founded by Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericsson, and Intel.
Already, carriers can combine unlicensed spectrum with their own licensed spectrum to create larger bandwidths for users. Advanced LTE technology known as LAA (Licensed Assisted Access) allows carriers to do this for the downlink (transmissions from base stations to devices), and the more recent eLAA (Enhanced Licensed Assisted Access) allows them to also do it for the uplink (transmissions from devices to base stations).
A third technology, called Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol, is similar to both LAA and eLAA in that it also combines licensed and unlicensed spectrum to deliver higher data rates on cell networks.
But all of these modes still rely on licensed spectrum as the “anchor” to which carriers then add capacity from unlicensed spectrum. In effect, MulteFire extends these advanced LTE capabilities to operate independently in unlicensed spectrum. In fact, the first MulteFire specification, released earlier this year, builds directly on 3GPP Releases 13 and 14, which describe LAA and eLAA.
With MulteFire, a device could operate at 5 GHz without anchoring to any licensed spectrum, thereby freeing up licensed resources for other mobile customers.
The technology dodges other Wi-Fi users (who may also broadcast at 5 GHz) by employing the same “listen-before-talk” protocol used in Wi-Fi today.
Read more here.