This symposium hosted by MIC and the European Commission (INFSO) took place in downtown Tokyo on Jan 19. It gathered a number of EU and Japanese researchers and officials to discuss potential future cooperation. The workplans for future commission programs are in the making and the purpose of the meeting was to find common areas of interest for future common projects.
A special session was held with specific emphasis on Short range Wireless was held. The author gave an overview over Challenges in mobile broadband access beyond 4G , listing some of the key the design choices to achieve 1000 times more capacity at the same cost and energy consumptions as today. A comparision between various spectrum options was made, comparing millimeter-wave(60Ghz) solutions with secondary spectrum solutions below 6GHz. The former provide significant bandwidth, but are restricted to LOS or almost LOS conditions. Lower spectrum has the advantage of uncritical, low-cost, plug-n-play deployment.
Many of the following presentations, in particular the Japanese ones, where focused on communications in the 60GHz range and higher frequencies. The applications presented were mainly very short range, Gbit/s device – to- device systems, where the NLOS problems are not critical. Examples were mobile terminal to terminal sync applications. Laurent Herault from LETI in France, however, presented an in-home communication systems with access points in every ceiling based on 60 GHz communication. The main target applications is distribution of video in homes.
