Showcasing 5G Handsets

Abstract

Applications are increasingly becoming more sophisticated and rich in content, requiring more capable devices with higher energy requirements. This provides the impetus for an overhaul of the design process to engineer future emerging handsets to include energy efficiency as an optimization metric, complementing legacy design goals that include multi-mode operation, miniaturization and flexibility. Throughout this book, multiple innovative solutions have been discussed to limit the energy consumption of mobile handsets which exploit not only the available communication infrastructure in legacy and future emerging mobile networks, but also exploit a context-aware architecture that can provide rich context. Until now, the aforementioned solutions have been tested both analytically and in software through system level simulation studies. However, to attain a real practical insight, this chapter takes a step further and implements the proposed algorithms/protocols on demonstrative hardware platforms to showcase the applicability of the scenarios under real operating conditions. The chapter presents three showcases for demonstrating short-range cooperation and vertical handovers for power saving, as well as energy efficient RF design. The concept pertaining to the first showcase demonstrates how nodes/handsets belonging to a cluster can cooperate to optimize their connection to the radio network in order to save battery power. The second showcase demonstrates how a flexible multi-standard handset can select the radio network which has the lowest energy demand while providing the required quality of service. This showcase requires a mobility platform which provisions seamless connectivity in heterogeneous radio technologies. The third showcase is a horizontal one, in that it demonstrates the benefits of the RF hardware building blocks previously proposed within the book (which includes the envelope-tracking Power Amplifier, Doherty Power Amplifier, Tunable Matching Network integrated circuit and a miniature multi-band antenna) for energy saving, where the showcase scenario would apply to both the cooperation and handover cases.