WINNER - Wireless World Initiative New Radio

Mugdim Bublin, Iavor Kambourov



Abstarct: WINNER (Wireless World Initiative New Radio), which began in January 2004, is an EU-funded project designed to look at future radio technologies. Following the completion of Phase I, which focused on the investigation of key technologies and their integration into a concept for a new radio interface, the second phase, WINNER II, which began in January 2006, will develop and optimize this concept to create a detailed system definition fulfilling future requirements of emerging mobile and wireless services and applications. In addition initial trials will be performed in order to demonstrate key elements of the WINNER II system.
The goal of the WINNER project is to address the development of mobile and wireless communications significantly beyond the ongoing activities in 3GPP on long-term evolution towards a “Beyond 3G” solution for mobile networks. The project aims to develop a single ubiquitous radio access system adaptable to a comprehensive range of mobile communication scenarios from short range to wide area. This will be based on a single radio access technology with enhanced capabilities compared to existing systems or their evolutions.
Forty one manufacturers, network operators, R&D centers and academic institutions are joining forces to continue their cooperation based on the results achieved during the Phase I of the project since January 2004. In total more than 2200 person-months have so far been expended on the project. The emphasis during the Phase II is on the development of a detailed system for a new beyond-3G radio interface.
This radio interface will support the challenging requirements of systems beyond 3G. It will be scalable in terms of carrier bandwidth and carrier frequency range and it will allow be capable of deployment in both the current mobile frequency bands and potential new frequency bands in order to address different operator requirements and regulatory conditions. The system will support a wide range of usage and radio environments providing a significant improvement in performance and Quality of Service.
The radio interface will optimize the use of spectral resources, e.g. through the exploitation of knowledge of actual channel conditions, leading-edge channel coding techniques optimized jointly with iterative receivers, and multiple antenna technology. New networking topologies (e.g. relaying) will support cost-efficient deployments. Support of advanced resource management and handover will ease the deployment of the WINNER system enabling seamless service provision and global roaming.
The project will also contribute to on-going global research, regulatory and standardization activities. The WINNER approach targets a globally harmonized system by early research cooperation of key players. The project objectives are shared by a strong consortium of major players in mobile and wireless communications.

Dr. Mugdim Bublin received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr. techn. degrees in electrical engineering from Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 1997 and 2004, respectively. He is with Siemens AG Austria since 1998. Within research and development department of Siemens he worked at first on the development of GSM mobile stations and father on simulations, performance evaluations and optimizations of 3rd generation UMTS radio networks. He works on wireless radio patent management and, from January 2006, on future radio EU project WINNER, phase 2.