Mobile CoMputing

I n recent years, the demand for mobile Internet access has grown significantly. The number of pages viewed on the mobile Web browser Opera grew from 1.8 billion pages in January 2008 to 23 billion pages in January 2010.1 However, the 3G technology that promised mobile broadband hasn’t been widely successful because of its low transmission rate and high service costs. As of the third quarter of 2009, the number of 3G subscribers was only around 11 percent of the number of 2G subscribers (www. gsacom.com/news/statistics.php4). To enable the mobile Internet, the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) Working Party 5D launched the International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-Advanced initiative, seeking proposals from communication standards organizations regarding 4G technologies. They’ve received several proposals, mainly based on two technologies: WiMAX, which refers to the IEEE 802.16 family of standards, and Long-Term Evolution (LTE), developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP; www.3gpp.org). Here, we review WiMAX and LTE, considering issues that could affect their deployment and adoption as 4G technologies.