2^nd EASY-C Public Workshop, April 16^th 2010, Dresden, Germany

On April 16^th 2010, the EASY-C project partners presented their latest project results at a public workshop in Dresden, Germany. Having received such a strong positive feedback after the initial EASY-C public workshop in December 2008, the EASY-C project partners once more presented their latest research findings and a multitude of live demonstrations. The event was co-located with a meeting of the LTE/SAE trial initiative (LSTI). Around 80 international mobile communications experts from all over the world, journalists and representatives from the Germany Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) attended the workshop. They used the chance to observe demonstrations of CoMP transmission and detection techniques and discussed with researchers several field measurement results. In a panel discussion, the project partners answered several questions on project results, and on the way forward regarding LTE-Advanced and beyond.

Vodafone Chair's EASY-C team showed the world’s first joint coherent transmission from three base stations to three mobile terminals. Together with other EASY-C project partners the following technological achievements have been presented on the workshop:

• experimental proof that various CoMP concepts so far only investigated in theory do indeed work in practice.
• identification of major challenges and proposal of solutions related to these concepts, such as synchronization, channel estimation, feedback and efficient backhauling.
• Development of CoMP concepts that can be used with minimal changes to the current LTE standard, such as
• Remote radio head concepts,
• Interference aware link adaptation, scheduling and beamforming,
• Single-cell multi-user detection, as well as
• Comprehensive evaluation of the potential gains of different CoMP concepts w.r.t. the required effort, both through simulations and practical field trials.

By providing a principal proof-of-concept of approaches in the world’s largest research test beds in Dresden and Berlin, the project partners gained significant experience in implementation and application of LTE-Advanced concepts, revealing inherent challenges and performance-vs.-complexity trade-offs. “The project has provided the German mobile communications industry with a large head-start concerning LTE-Advanced and a stronger impact on standardization”, said project coordinator Prof. Dr. Gerhard Fettweis in his resume during the final panel discussion.

The project management team would like to thank everybody who contributed to the workshop. Special thanks go to EASY-C project partners, to BMBF, as well as to the team of K.I.T. and Hotel Pullmann Dresden Newa, without their support the workshop has never been possible.

Please find below some impressions of the workshop. [Klick on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures.]