Beyond the Ultra-Dense Barrier - Paradigm shifts on the road beyond 1000x wireless capacity

TL;DR

This paper argues that current mobile broadband design paradigms are insufficient for future capacity needs and proposes that scalable, cost-effective technical and business solutions are necessary to achieve extremely high indoor capacities.

Contribution

It introduces a new paradigm shift focusing on techno-economic solutions for ultra-dense indoor wireless environments beyond 1000x capacity.

Findings

High capacities are feasible in indoor environments.

Current technological advances alone are insufficient for future capacity demands.

Business models are crucial for scalable solutions.

Abstract

It has become increasingly clear that the current design paradigm for mobile broadband systems is not a scalable and economically feasible way to solve the expected future 'capacity crunch', in particular in indoor locations with large user densities. 'Moore's law', e.g. state-of-the art signal processing and advanced antenna techniques now being researched, as well as more millimeter wave spectrum indeed provide more capacity, but are not the answer to the 3-4 orders of magnitude more capacity at today's cost, that is needed.We argue that solving the engineering problem of providing high data rates alone is not sufficient. Instead we need to solve the techno-economic problem to find both business models and scalable technical solutions that provide extreme area capacity for a given cost and energy consumption. In this paper we will show that achieving very high capacities is indeed feasible in indoor environments.