Following the successful LTE Awards 2013, we speak to Mark Thompson, sales and marketing director for Samsung Networks Europe, winners in the Best LTE RAN Product category.

Tell us more about your entry for the LTE Award 2013

Samsung LTE solutions are focused on facilitating and supporting media delivery networks. Our industry-leading portfolio of RAN solutions is based on the concept of Telecom and IT convergence. Smart LTE Networks, already commercialised in South Korea, is an LTE solution that leverages this concept to incorporate real-time radio scheduling, content caching and delivery, media broadcast and mobile computing over LTE networks.

Smart SON, one of the components of Smart LTE Networks, provides advanced network optimisation for all types of RAN: macro cell, femto cell and pico cell as well as Heterogeneous Networks. Unlike conventional SON, it optimises the network in near real-time, resulting in dramatic cost reduction and performance gains for mobile operators.

We hope to leverage the great platform provided by LTE World Summit, one of the largest LTE focused industry events, to share the success of our cutting-edge technologies with thousands of attendees across all domains.

What do you think made your entry stand out from the crowd?

With data-centric networks increasingly in demand, where a high Quality of Service (QoS) for every user is imperative, operators are searching for a solution that helps ease the burden of radio optimisation, thereby ensuring healthy network operation.

Samsung’s Smart SON delivers this by using real-time radio resource information available from Samsung’s innovative Smart Scheduler and providing near real-time network optimisation capabilities to LTE networks. The solution supports all RAN configurations including macro cells, small cells and even Heterogeneous Networks.

With continuous monitoring of site health and radio coverage, Smart SON shows powerful performance in network optimisation and network healing, thus delivering higher QoS to end-users.

How will your product evolve and improve in the future?

The mobile communications world is entering a new era where mobile smart devices would want seamless and high quality connectivity. Going forward, Samsung Smart SON would offer more capabilities for intelligent and faster network optimisation through Big Data analytics.

One such aspect would involve the improvement of initial network optimisation by directly feeding additional information from LTE Release 10 supporting UEs to Smart SON.

Smart SON would also incorporate ‘network initiated handovers’ to balance the cell loads in real-time using Smart Scheduler. It would be used to automatically switch an LTE user located in edge area from a heavily loaded cell to a less loaded cell. This would ensure better QoS to edge users in the network and more efficient utilisation of radio resources.

What trends do you see ahead for the industry for the next 12 months?

Carrying mobile video traffic over LTE networks with high QoS, while keeping network costs in control, will be a major challenge for operators in 2013. LTE allows for greatly expanded room for data on the air interface compared to 3G, yet RAN backhaul cannot meet such growing traffic demands without huge investments. Operators will need innovative solutions to enhance media delivery capabilities at the edge of the network in order to fully utilise the potential of LTE.

What are the biggest challenges the lie ahead for LTE?

There is no doubt that the LTE is showing the greatest growth and proliferation in the global market than any other mobile technologies ever. At the same time, it is undeniable that there are some challenges to overcome for the continuous growth in LTE markets such as spectral fragmentation and requirements on backhaul and access.

What impact has winning this award had for your business?

Samsung has been at the forefront of network innovation with Smart LTE Networks, which introduces telecom and IT convergence into wireless networks. This award recognises one of the elements of Smart LTE Networks – Smart SON, which takes LTE performance to the next level through near real-time optimisation capabilities.

The ‘Best LTE RAN Product’ award is a very prestigious and is a testimony to our innovation success.

We hope that this award and the great platform provided by Informa Telecoms and Media would bring us closer to building future-relevant Media delivery networks.