Spectrum demand for systems beyond IMT-2000 based on data rate estimates

In different regions, research activities on systems beyond third generation mobile communication started already around 1999. The major drivers for these systems are the increasing demand for personal mobile communications with respect to performance, applications, traffic demand and easy to use including communications involving machines. From the user perspective, increasing personal mobility enforces mobile communications in business and the private sector. ITU-R WP8F, ITU-T SSG and bodies like WWRF are currently working on the vision of systems beyond IMT-2000 on global basis in cooperation with the research activities and are defining the basic requirements. New elements of these systems for the mobile access (up to 100 Mbps peak cell capacity) and the nomadic/wireless local area access (up to 1 Gbps peak cell capacity) are being discussed. These requirements result in a huge amount of needed spectrum. In this paper, the impact on spectrum demand for a new mobile broadband access element is investigated with respect to estimated data rate requirements from the user perspective. For that purpose, the radio interface is described in generic form based on a modified Shannon channel capacity formula to obtain generalized results independent of a particular radio interface concept. With the relation between cluster size, carrier/interference-ratio and coverage requirements the spectrum demand and system throughput is calculated in closed form for the case of a radio interface with fixed and adaptive modulation and coding. The nomadic/wireless local area access according to ITU-R is not considered here. These investigations are based on simplified system concepts without considering advanced antenna, scheduling and network deployment concepts. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.