Data center peeps out there will appreciate this.

Courtesy of Victor: “In the UK Computer museum, an ICL 2900 series (mainframe class, mid 70′s). They said that they had these displays to show customers that their computer were doing 4 things at the same time (P1…P4) and still have some juice left.”

In order to get some work done, ya know the bill paying type, I adapted my desktop using some very useful software. The net effect of this is that my desktop is now mono-task, monotastic in my view! To do this, I’ve installed:

• MenuEclipse – kills off any distracting trace of the Mac OS X menu bar.
• Isolator – Only allows one application run in the desktop foreground. All other applications take a back seat and the desktop is kept hidden.

Here are my notes from my visit at the LTE Advanced Workshop organised by CTVR and FAME. Interesting topic, albeit not really my domain of knowledge, hence my attendance at the tutorial!

What’s LTE Advanced?

• 3GPP Release 8 is what is known as Long Term Evolution (LTE). Release 10 is LTE Advanced (3GPP) and is the same as IMT Advanced (ITU).
• Backward compatible with Release 8.
• LTE Advanced satisfies ITU basic requirements and also introduces additional features.
• WiMax2 + LTE Advanced are very similar (I wonder how similar at the low level though?!).
• IMT Advanced is for 4G as IMT-2000 was for 3G.
• IMT Advanced deals only with the radio access network (RAN).
• Differences in spectrum.
• Specification to be released in early 2011.
• All aspects within are large areas. Up to 600 papers submitted in some topic areas.
• ITU to recommend specification, 3GPP to release in parallel all in early 2011.
• “Faster” – there’s lots of increased MHz rates.
• Target deployment example – micro-cellular (“urban micro”).
• General Arch: LTE terminal -> LTE radio access network -> SAE CN (?) -> ISP.
• Release 11 will enhance release 10.
• Release 12 – content open. This is where research-oriented input is required. Example: UE-2-UE (device) communications using network operator resources.
• QoS is sufficient in release 8 for release 10.
• My opinion – Seems to be a want to push carrier technology down into the home from the network (e.g. replace WiFi, with network as a service). You don’t own the equipment network operator does. Network operator has total control. Tiered network rears its head.

Select Discussed LTE Advanced Features

During the talk various features of LTE Advanced were highlighted. Here are some of them that had my ears pricked-up…

Carrier Aggregation

• Very cool. Virtual Carriers created on the fly. Something that was needed on a previous FP7 proposal related to the intersection of cloud computing and mobile networks.
• Compose concurrent carriers of differing bandwidths, no hand-overs needed as in the case of Release 8.
• Aggregation schemes intra-band and inter-band aka spectrum aggregation.
• Applicable to uplink and downlink – asymmetric.
• Cell symmetric but also per UE asymmetric.
• Dynamic allocation of bandwidth QoS.

Enhanced MIMO

• Interesting: access to multiple distributed APs from one UE and coordination.
• Problem: power, more connections to APs more power usage. Example of 3G power usage given (uses MIMO).

HetNet: Enhanced support for heterogeneous networks

• Mix of base stations – femto, pico, macro.
• Originally had hierarchical cell sys (HCS) but is unattractive from regulatory point of view in the case of dense cell structure.
• HetNet can give dense infrastructure.
• Heterogeneity by power output, not necessarily in specification uniformity (appears interoperability is not dealt with?).
• Closed subscriber group – similar to WiFi access point – related to access rights.
• Problem today is there’s not enough uplink in networks – solve perhaps with more pico in a HetNet deployment scenario.

On Wednesday (April 14th), Ross Cooney and I organised and held the second CloudCamp Dublin. The event was kindly hosted by Microsoft in their great venue in Sandyford. The event had over 80 attendees from a large variety of backgrounds. Notably this time, there was a large number of people from the provider market-section. Following opening words from Ross, we kicked off with a special presentation from Daragh O’Brien that focused on data protection considerations within the Cloud. Daragh’s slides can be found at his website. Following a short break of the traditional pizza and beer we kicked off into the lightening talks. Here are those presentations:

• Gary Ramsey, OpSource - slides
• Raphael Cohn, StormMQ – slides
• Andy Edmonds, Intel – slides
• Kevin O’Connor, Hosting365 - slides
• Ross Cooney, emailcloud - slides
• Cormac Keogh, Microsoft – slides

As if one CloudCamp in Ireland within the space of 24 hours was not enough, Ross continued on down to Cork to look after the first ever CloudCamp Cork. At that particular event there was over 60 attendees, many of whom came from an IT support background.