Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) is a breakthrough technology which will support the ITU’s vision for next generation services. It combines the best aspects of CDMA, TDM, LS-OFDM, OFDM, and OFDMA into a single air interface using advanced and highly optimized control and signaling mechanisms. It also incorporates advanced antenna techniques such as MIMO and SDMA. The combination of these techniques enables UMB to achieve higher peak data rates, very low latency and very high spectral efficiency. The technology has a flexible and dynamic mode of operation to combine and allocate spectrum as needed for the variety of user applications and activities.
The UMB standard is currently being developed by the 3GPP2 with the publication scheduled for April 2007 and commercial availability in early 2009.
Key Features of UMB include:
- Multiple radio and advanced antenna techniques
- Sophisticated control and signaling mechanisms (minimized) combine the best aspects of CDMA, TDM, OFDM, and OFDMA into a single air interface
- Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), Spatial Division Multiple Access (SDMA) and beamforming antenna techniques
- Improved interference management techniques
- Ultra-high mobile broadband peak data rates
- Up to 288 Mbps peak data rate on forward link
- Up to 75 Mbps peak data rate on reverse link
- Ultra-low network latency
- An average of 16 msec (32-byte, RTT) end-to-end network latency
- Enhanced VoIP capacity and user experience
- Up to 1000 simultaneous VoIP users (20 MHz FDD allocations)
- Scalable IP-based flat or hierarchical architecture
- Greater service deployment flexibility, improved performance, and lower cost of ownership
- Flexible spectrum allocations
- Scalable, non-contiguous and dynamic channel (bandwidth) allocations
- Support for incremental bandwidth allocations from 1.25 MHz to 20 MHz
- Support of multi-carrier operations
- Optimized power consumption
- Time-to-Market commercial availability
