1.4 Underlying Technology Evolution

The radio technology improvements need to be supported by the evolution of the underlying technologies. The technology components – including mass storage, baseband, RF and batteries – keep evolving and help the radio improvements to materialize. The size of the mass storage is expected to have fastest growth during the next ten years which allows for storing more data on the device and which may fuel data download over the radio. The memory size can increase from tens of Gigabytes to several Terabytes. Also the digital processing has its strong evolution. The digital processing power has improved according to Moore's law for several decades. The evolution of the integration level will not be as easy as in earlier times, especially when we need to minimize the device power consumption. Still, the digital processing capabilities will improve during the 2010s, which allows for processing of higher data rates and more powerful interference cancellation techniques. Another area of improvement is the RF bandwidth which increases mainly because of innovations in digital front end processing. The terminal power consumption remains one of the challenges because the battery capacity is expected to have relatively slow evolution. Therefore, power saving features in the devices will still be needed. The technology evolution is illustrated in Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4 Evolution of underlying technology components.

LTE-Advanced devices and base stations will ...

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