LTE North America Award Preview - Best Enabling Technology for LTE

The Lte North America Awards Will Take Place On The 8 November 2011 At The Fairmont Hotel In Dallas, Texas, Usa

The LTE North America awards 2011 are taking place on the 8th November 2011 at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, Texas, USA. The awards celebrate the innovation and excellence in that has taken place over the past 12 months in the LTE industry and features 60 nominees across 9 categories.

In the lead up to the awards, we are featuring close looks at each of the companies shortlisted and here we bring you a preview of the category: Best Enabling Technology for LTE.

Alcatel-Lucent: Consumer LTE Communications Solution

The Alcatel-Lucent Consumer LTE Communications solution enables carriers to offer a service whereby users can easily have HD quality conversations with other users on the network, whether by audio, video or MMS. The solution is designed to place the carriers at the centre of the communication experience and thus enables them to enhance their competitiveness and protect their revenue stream from voice and text services that are currently under threat.

The solution leverages LTE’s all-IP architecture and is implemented using the latest innovations in Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) including simplification of management systems, scalable IMS, direct Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), integrated session border control and HD media servers.

The technology is integrated with Alcatel-Lucent’s and other vendors’ 4G LTE eUTRAN and EPC systems, including the Rx interface between the IMS’ P-CSCF and the EPC’s PCRF, plus a variety of smartphones and clients.

Alcatel-Lucent says it has been shown to match or exceed legacy 2G/3G systems for Quality of Service. The vendor has two contracts for the system so far including Verizon’s Wireless pending launch in 2012 of VoLTE and more than 12 trials currently in operation.

Aricent: LTE eNodeB Software Framework

Carriers are on the lookout for easily deployable LTE base station solutions that can help reduce both cost and time to market. Aricent has developed a comprehensive eNodeB software framework that provides carriers with optimized performance, scalability and plug-and-play functionality. The solution can be scaled from femto to macro form factor without re-architecting, and thus helps carriers respond to changing market dynamics quickly and cost effectively. This standard compliant software framework has a modular and flexible architecture that enables easy porting and optimisation on any platform, processor, or operating system, ranging from single-core to multi-core architectures. It provides ready of-the-shelf functionality for rapid development and deployment. The technology has been widely deployed by various carriers globally and has been licensed by many leading OEMs with more than 25 design wins in the LTE space so far.

Motorola Solutions: Motorola LTE Prioritization Service

Public Safety LTE will enable powerful solutions for better protecting our first responders and the communities they serve.  The Motorola Public Safety LTE Prioritization Service gives agencies the ability to immediately prioritise those users most critical to serving an incident, while de-prioritising nonessential users in order to ensure they have access to network resources when disaster strikes.

The Motorola Public Safety LTE Prioritization Service works in conjunction with a standards-based Public Safety Subscriber and Policy Manager and is interoperable with public carrier LTE networks providing a way for public safety agencies to extend their coverage through roaming agreements.  This technology is targeted at improving control over QoS and has been proven in public demonstrations at customer meetings and trade-shows.

Nokia Siemens Networks: Liquid Radio

As data consumption continues to grow, driven by ever higher penetration of smartphones, new applications, laptop connectivity and M2M communication operators are faced with a CAPEX/OPEX challenge as they move quickly to evolve their networks and maintain their customers.

Liquid Radio, a portfolio of innovations for building radio access networks, addresses this challenge by enabling operators to evolve their radio access networks so they can dynamically accommodate the natural ebb and flow of traffic without the congestion caused by spikes in demand.

It consists of three innovations. These are the Flexi Multiradio Antenna System, a new way of providing additional capacity with Beamforming, Baseband Pooling, which centralises processing functions common to every base station in a given area to release up to 80 per cent of unused baseband capacity, and Unified Heterogeneous Networks, where all radio network elements are unified through automated management and seamless interworking.

Liquid Radio was launched in March 2011 and a Tier-1 operator in Europe has already implemented the Liquid Radio architecture.

Powerwave Technologies: LTE Picocell

Powerwave’s LTE Picocell is an all-in-one, compact Picocell that combines broadband LTE and WiFi into one single base station to provide low latency, high-capacity throughput for mobile wireless device users indoors or outdoors, in areas of poor reception or high usage. The product’s form factor and signal power levels are optimised for office buildings, shopping centres, hotels, airports, and other similar venues. It supports all 4G-frequency bands in the 700 MHz to 2.7 GHz range and also features a 2×2 MIMO antenna for additional capacity. It supports up to 1,000 registered users, with up to 100 users in active data transfer mode. It also offers carriers remote provisioning, monitoring and maintenance capabilities that help reduce total cost of ownership.

Reverb Networks: PerformaBeams, antenna based Self Optimization Network (SON) software solution

Reverb’s PerformaBeams SON solution is a fully automated Self Optimization Network solution that continuously monitors the RAN to evaluate the effective coverage of the network antenna settings.  It provides operators the ability to uniformly engineer and manage the complexities of 3G and 4G technologies on combined or separate antennas with little to no daily manual intervention. This helps to make LTE more attractive by simplifying the engineering manageability, increasing the ROI with an efficient network deployment, and increasing the end-user experience by maximizing data throughput and minimizing outages with rapid self-healing capabilities.  Reverb Networks has several carriers trialling the technology, including one Tier One operator.

SEVEN Networks: Open Channel

As smartphones proliferate throughout society, the amount of signalling pressure on networks is increasing exponentially. SEVEN Networks’ Open Channel is a mobile traffic optimization solution designed to address this problem by eliminating unnecessary requests and reducing the time the device is on the network by up to 40 percent without affecting user experience. It leverages a combination of well-understood caching and proxying technologies that have already been proven to make the Internet more efficient but have not been used to date in the world of mobile devices. Open Channel is now in network trials with carriers around the world and is expected to be deployed on a live network in Q4 2011.

ZTE: ZXSDR BS8920

The ZXSDR BS8920 is the world’s first commercial LTE micro base station with 2x10W capability and 2T4R MIMO. It is also the world’s smallest LTE micro base station with a large capacity and throughput and yet is also a clean, convenient, efficient and low-cost solution. The small size enables easier, speedier and less expensive installation, and it can be set up to support a range of configurations such as Omni, directional, or cascading coverage. This is turn helps the end user through offering a better-quality voice service and faster data speeds.