|
|
 |
|
Viewing report
|
|
|
|
Long Term Evolution: LTE - MAC - Technology and Competitor Landscape Report - Key players, innovators and industry analysis
Dolcera, Jan 2012, Pages: 28
LTE MAC standard is being defined by the 3GPP group. As the de-facto standards body, all firms actively participating in the standardization process contribute/declare their patents to the body. The patents contributed to the 3GPP body have to be declared as relevant to (a) the standard and (b) the technical specification within the standard by the contributing company. Step (a) of the declaration citing the relevant standard for the patent is mandatory, failing which the contributing company is not eligible for royalties. Part (b) involving citing the relevant technical specification to which the patent is relevant is voluntary.
The patent contributions to any LTE standard are voluntary and are not screened by the 3GPP body for their relevance to the technical subject. As a result, akin to a gold rush, companies have a strong incentive to disclose as many patents as they have relevant to as many technical specifications as possible. In summary, contributions to a technical specification do not necessarily mean the patents are relevant to the standard.
The gold rush phenomenon increases the information asymmetry between the patent holder and a potential licensee. This information asymmetry creates challenges for companies that sit down to negotiate expensive royalty arrangements subsequent to the commercial roll out of the standard.
It is thus extremely important for a licensee to understand the essential patents in any standard. A standard is an amalgamation of many technical specifications, and one needs to understand the essential patents in each technical specification of the standard.
Dolcera Centre for excellence in the electronics and communications domain has identified this problem and as a neutral 3rd party is screening the contributions to the 3GPP body to identify the ‘probably essential’ patents. The Dolcera Centre for excellence is working on various technical specifications to identify the ‘essential patents’ for that specification.
The process of identification followed by Dolcera team is as follows – (a) identifying all patent contributions to a technical specification from the 3GPP database (b) screening all the patents for a technical specification for its technical relevance to one of the embodiments of the standard (c) identifying from all the relevant patents, the patents that are essential to a standard’s implementation.
Step (a) has been done by the Dolcera team by collating the patent contributions made to the 3GPP consortium. The step (b) of screening patents has been done by Dolcera team of technical experts by reading through the patents. Dolcera team has spent close to 15 to 20 minutes reading each patent document to determine its relevance to a technical area. And finally step (c) that focuses on identifying whether a technically relevant document is probably essential to the standard or not, has been performed by spending close to an hour on each technically relevant document. In this step the team has done a close comparison of the claims of all relevant documents to the technical implementation steps disclosed in the standard.
Dolcera team has for the purpose of this report gone through all the patent contributions made under the Technical specifications 36.321 to determine the patents that are technically relevant to MAC and more importantly to identify the subset of patents that are ‘probably essential’ to the MAC implementation under LTE.
Long Term Evolution (LTE)
Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems are designed with an objective of having much higher data rates compared to 3G systems. This is a challenging proposition as wireless networks are subject to interference, multipath and poor propagation channel characteristics that limit data rates.
LTE - MAC
The MAC layer is the lowest sub-layer in the Layer 2 architecture of the LTE radio protocol
stack. The connection to the physical layer below is through transport channels, and the
connection to the RLC layer above is through logical channels. The MAC layer therefore
performs multiplexing and demultiplexing between logical channels and transport channels:
the MAC layer in the transmitting side constructs MAC PDUs, known as transport blocks,
from MAC SDUs received through logical channels, and the MAC layer in the receiving side
recovers MAC SDUs from MAC PDUs received through transport channels.
The following functions are supported by MAC sublayer:
- Mapping between logical channels and transport channels;
- Multiplexing of MAC SDUs from one or different logical channels onto transport blocks (TB) to be delivered to the physical layer on transport channels;
- Demultiplexing of MAC SDUs from one or different logical channels from transport blocks (TB) delivered from the physical layer on transport channels;
- Scheduling information reporting;
- Error correction through HARQ;
- Priority handling between UEs by means of dynamic scheduling;
- Priority handling between logical channels of one UE;
- Logical Channel prioritization;
- Transport format selection.
Product samples
A sample for this product is available. Please Login/Register to download this sample.
|
|
|
|
