What can I actually do for you in the field of Mobile Communications?
- Pre study and conceptual work for new applications that rely on the strengths of 3GPP networks or anticipate their extension, such as Public Safety and GSM-R evolution.
- Represent you at 3GPP standardisation meetings concerning such opportunities - together we prepare and present documents to enable your services to be integrated into the 5G ecosystem! We have recently participated in SA and RAN Plenary meetings and presented documents at the SA1 group
- Specification, coordination as well testing and end to end verification for telecommunications projects and the management of these activities. I also have significant experience of technical coordination between different suppliers and operators for such projects where it is sometimes difficult to reach a consensus.
- Working in the tender process - able to specify and evaluate tenders, and also many years of experience at answering tenders.
- Over the years I have worked with emphasis in the core network area. However recently many of the activities have involved LTE radio access and how it can be configured to deliver the characteristics requested by the core network - such as the handling of QCI and APR by the admission control and scheduler features of the radio access and evaluating the effects on both the subscribers they were intended for and the remaining subscribers!
My background in Mobile Communications
I came to Switzerland in 1988 to work on the analog NMT mobile network with the Ascom company, using Ericsson equipment. I worked in field support for the MSC switches which were derived from the land line AXE Ericsson system, with an extra subsystem that handled setup of circuit switched voice calls in the mobile network, connected to Base Station Controllers. Later I worked on the introduction of the 2G GSM system, which added data connections. Later 3G, 4G and 5G. I worked in design projects for Ericsson in the 1990's and moved on to product management when design was transferred to Asia.
In general the modern public Mobile Systems work exceptionally well. They are very professionally standardised. There is now a trend to do new things with these systems and incorporate them into the existing standards. That is what 5G is all about.
Satellite communications and 5G
I have worked in 3GPP standardisation of 5G, within the SA1, SA2 and SA6 working groups, for the integration of Satellite Communications in the 5G system. This was a contract for the SES company in Luxembourg.
Public safety LTE
Existing public safety systems are built for secure voice communications and small amounts of data. They use their own system standards and it is difficult to see how they can be extended economically to allow for large amounts of data.
There are many ways to run trial public safety systems using the existing LTE standards. For the 3GPP releases 16 and 17 much tighter integration of public safety requirements is being built into the standards.
GSM-R evolution for railway communications
The existing system is also mainly built up around the need to secure voice communication and to transfer small amounts of data in a very reliable way. For railway systems the railway requirements are being built into the 3GPP systems from release 15, but in some areas the earlier work started for public safety applications can be reused or extended for railway communications.
Other areas
I have a strong background in LTE in general and specifically in Voice over LTE. Also interworking between LTE and WCDMA/HSPA and GSM
Looking forward I am interested in how others applications could use the 3GPP networks in an efficient way, and how they can be integrated into the standards - such as vehicle applications and private LTE networks.
Handover, QoS, roaming
These are the network actions and parameters that I has been investigating recently. If you have both separate and shared resources you must be able to handover efficiently. If you have urgent and normal traffic you must be able to prioritise between them.
Core network, Radio access
My background is in the Packet Core network. Nowdays I work end-2-end. The core network passes discrete attribute values to the radio access. In the different radio accesses there re an array of features that can use those discrete parameters, hopefully to create the desired effect - ARP used to prioritise at admission control; QCI to allocate more resources to the currently prioritised user in the radio scheduler.