DECT Evolution towards Meeting the Requirements for IMT-2020 in the Residential Environment

Abstract

Energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency have been identified by “IMT for 2020 and beyond” (International Mobile Telecommunications) as two of the current wireless network capabilities that need substantial enhancement to satisfy the exponential growth of IoT and high data rate applications. “Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications” (DECT) is the leading standard around the world for cordless telecommunications and it has the great advantage to operate on a “designated” license-free RF band (1880/1900 MHz in Europe). However, the original DECT has very low energy efficiency and very low spectral efficiency, and therefore, DECT is neither suitable for ultra-low energy applications nor for high data rate multimedia streaming applications. The “European Telecommunications Standards Institute” Technical Committee DECT (ETSI TC DECT) is working on these two aspects, and it has proposed a new set of “Technical Specifications” that enables DECT to support both ultra-low energy (DECT-ULE) and high data rate (DECT-2020 New Radio) application domains. In this paper, we introduce an energy consumption model for the DECT “Portable Part” (PP) that lets us analyze in detail the operation of a PP in the “standby mode”. The model lets us show that the simple reduction on the requirement of how often the PP must monitor the “paging” beacon enables DECT for ultra-low energy applications. We then show that the use of the state-of-the-art multi-carrier “Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing” (OFDM) modulation, and the spatial multiplexing “Multiple Input Multiple Output” (MIMO) antenna technique, enables DECT for high data rate multimedia streaming applications.