LONDON — Though the commercial deployment of third-generation (3G) mobile communications systems hasn't even started, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has formed a research group in London targeting fourth-generation mobile technology.
Samsung Electronics Research Institute (SERI) already has 60 researchers working on 2.5G and 3G technologies, and plans to double its research staff over the next year as it ramps up 4G work. "We believe 4G is eight to 10 years out," said Jan Nottelmann, director of telecommunications at SERI (Staines, England). "Because Samsung was relatively late starting [in mobile communications] it does not hold a lot of essential intellectual property in GSM and 3G, but we know that both GSM and 3G are heavily based on research conducted 10 years before their introduction."
The early commitment indicates Samsung's determination to eventually be a leader in mobile technology, said Nottelmann, who conceded that concepts for 4G communications are still rudimentary. But SERI's aim is to start driving 4G research and standardization initiatives, he said. In that way, Samsung hopes to influence the direction of 4G technology. SERI is Samsung's only 4G research group outside Korea.
"We'll start small on 4G and gradually build the activity up," Nottelmann said. "This is also partly about creating an exciting environment for the people we already have.
"So far there are no official bodies considering 4G, but it will start to happen in the next year to 18 months," he said. It will be vital that some SERI researchers attend those standards-setting meetings, he said.
SERI will work with a number of companies both inside and outside the Samsung group along with a number of universities across Europe, Nottelmann said. "Nobody knows whether 4G is going to be a completely new technology or built out of existing wireless technologies. I think 4G is likely to build on existing technology, just as 3G builds on 2.5G. But there may be a 3.5G generation. Nobody can say."
Other communications researchers have said that 4G might include a superior form of radio subsystem that could "sniff" radio waves to find out which of the multitude of cellular communications standards are available. It might also have the means to negotiate a connection through the most appropriate wireless medium. But it is not clear whether 4G could harness this capability along with other innovative modulation schemes on existing or new carrier frequencies.
"One of the powerful ideas is dynamic bandwidth allocation, so that a handset can use bandwidth efficiently," Nottelmann said of 4G technologies. While power and hardware performance will be technology challenges, "if you look at it overall, very advanced software is the key," he said.
