North America is certainly taking the lead in 4G adoption, with a wide range of LTE deployments from carriers large and small. As such, it’s only fitting that alongside the LTE North America conference we are celebrating the greatest triumphs in the LTE space at the LTE North America Awards 2011.

The awards celebrate the innovation and excellence in LTE that has taken place over the past 12 months and features 60 nominees across 10 categories

In the lead up to the awards, which will take place on the 8th November 2011 at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, Texas, USA, we will be featuring a look at all the companies nominated.

We start off our overview of the awards with a look at three companies nominated for Best contribution to R&D for LTE.

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Huawei is a vendor that is strongly associated with LTE and ranked number one for contributions to the 3GPP LTE Standard. It has over 40 commercial LTE launches round the world, including many LTE deployments across Asia and a high profile engagement with Vodafone Hutchinson in Australia. It has 20 R&D centres globally seven of which are dedicated to LTE, backed by a total of 4,500 dedicated LTE engineers.

Among its many LTE related achievements this year it has opened an R&D centre in New Jersey, in order to be close to one of the main hotspots of LTE activity round the world, and is the only vendor to have launched a SingleSON solution. It has also launched a research project on LTE FDD and TDD standards and was the first company to release a dual-mode chipset, based on its own design.

It has also demonstrated using LTE for backhaul, and established several global LTE Interoperability testing (IOT) labs. It claims to have lowered the cost of enabling operators to invest in LTE through its SingleRAN solution and base stations with dual-mode support for TDD and FDD.

InterDigital, Inc.

Through its work on LTE InterDigital is driving to bring the future ‘network of networks’, where people and things are connected seamlessly, to fruition.

Its focus is on spectrally efficient innovations and new topologies for LTE Advanced, such as ‘Fuzzy-Cell’ technology, designed to improve performance around the cell edge.

In terms of immediate work on LTE it is perfecting MIMO antenna technologies, advanced OFDM, and SC-FDMA signalling techniques, Hybrid-ARQ for fast error correction, and schemes for discontinuous reception that improve handset battery life.
ZTE

ZTE is a global telecoms equipment vendor with 23 commercial LTE contracts, yet is also known to consumer for its range of terminal devices with up to 100,000 LTE terminals shipments worldwide. In early 2011 t launched the AL600, supporting LTE-FDD/UMTS/EVDO, while the ZTE’s AL621, the world’s first LTE FDD/DC HSPA+ dual-mode dual-frequency data card, is used in CSL’s commercial network.

ZTE has eight global R&D centres and in excess of 4,000 research staff. In 2010 it invested €140 million in LTE-related research, submitted 4,7000 proposals to the 3GPP related to LTE and also submitted 3,200 LTE related patent applications. This gives a clear sense of the strength of its involvement in the research and development of LTE.

Its teams are experts in Evolved Packet-Core devices and chipsets and the creation if its Uni-RAN multi-mode, multi-band baseband and radio units.

It has a wide range of LTE base stations products in the Distributed, Integrated, Micro, and Pico categories. As recently as June 2011 it unveiled the world’s first CDMA/LTE Micro Base Station and the world’s first commercial LTE Micro Base Station BS8920.

It has helped Swedish operator Hi3G to build the first LTE TDD/FDD commercial network and built and in November 2010 launched the first LTE/DC-HSPA+ network in Hong Kong with CSL.

VoLTE could be a game changer when it truly arrives and in November 2010, ZTE and CSL showcased the world’s first VoLTE call based on IMS with existing mobile networks at MAC 2010. With an eye on the future it plans to commercially launch LTE Advanced products in 2012.

The LTE North America Awards will take place on the 8 November 2011 at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, Texas, USA