LTE Awards 2012 – Category 7 Preview: Best LTE RAN Product

Now in its third year, the annual LTE Awards, in association with Telecoms.com, are now established as the leading event of its kind. The LTE Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and reward the great innovations that are being made in the industry, and this year are co-located with the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the evening of the 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona. The event is sure to be a glamorous and entertaining evening for all participants.

The winners, from a varied selection of 10 categories and 48 shortlisted companies, will be picked by an independent panel of judges, consisting of leading industry experts, during a two week assessment process.

To whet your appetite for the event here is a preview of Category 7: Best LTE RAN Product.

This award recognises Radio Access Network elements that are exceptional in their area. The judges look at how the product contributes to making LTE more attractive for operators to deploy and how it contributed to the success of a commercial LTE deployment.

Alcatel-Lucent: LightRadio Metro Cell

LightRadio cube-based Metro Cells solve the fundamental problem of cost-effectively satisfying users’ demand for more capacity and a better quality of experience, while ensuring community acceptance of new equipment. The LightRadio Metro Cell is a small cube that weighs about 300g and has a very low power draw. The LightRadio Metro Cells uses a unique frequency selective scheduler and a Bell Labs innovative enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) to effectively manage interference. As a result, LTE Metro Cells may be successfully deployed using either dedicated or shared carriers. It’s also one of the first cellular network solutions to minimise environmental impact in terms of both carbon footprint reduction and aesthetic acceptance. LightRadio Metro Cells are in trials with many operators today, most notably with Telefonica as announced in February.

CellMax Technologies: Antennas

CellMax range of ‘next generation’  high-efficiency antennas for base stations use patented technology that eliminates energy losses in the internal feed network inside the antenna, increasing energy efficiency to 96 per cent compared to the 25-60 per cent energy heat losses of traditional antennas. Results from live LTE networks (2600MHz) show a data throughput increase of +25-100 per cent bit rate just by replacing standard LTE antennas with high efficiency LTE antennas from CellMax. Results also show up to 30 per cent increase in geographical coverage, a 10-20 per cent increase in net traffic, and a 20 per cent reduction in costs per call for the same amount of power consumed. CellMax antennas are used today by many operators including T-Mobile, Huawei, Hutchison, Ericsson, NSN, and ZTE. The LTE product line was launched in 2010.

Huawei Technologies: GigaSite

Huawei’s GigaSite solution is designed for operators to build the next generation of mobile broadband. It includes the ARU (Adaptive Radio Unit) and the AtomCell. The total size of its integrated antenna and radio unit is comparable to a standalone antenna, and its modular design can be easily configured. It can simultaneously support three separate bands over three different modes (typically for LTE, including GSM and UMTS), and supports cell splitting to improve overall cell capacity by up to 80 per cent. The ARU features the world’s highest single-unit throughput with 1.6Gbps on the Downlink. The ARU is specifically designed to meet the challenges of ever increasing upload with its 4-way receiver technology, which is capable of boosting gain by up to 40 per cent to help uplink throughput reach 850Mbps. The Huawei ARU was deployed by UK operators at the end of 2011 on commercial networks.

Nokia Siemens Networks: Flexi Multiradio 10 base station

The Flexi Multiradio 10 base station is the evolution of the Flexi Multiradio base station, the first LTE-ready Single RAN base station in the market. It provides for ten times higher baseband capacity and reduces power consumption by 30 per cent. It offers the industry’s highest integration density for achieving maximum throughputs in a minimum amount of space. For example, just one Flexi Multiradio System Module has been used to perform the world’s first LTE-Advanced demonstration with throughputs exceeding 1.4Gbps over 100MHz of aggregated spectrum. Site capacity can be scaled to beyond 10Gbps by pooling of system modules.

Samsung Electronics: Smart LTE Networks

Smart LTE Networks is a RAN solution for LTE that utilises an advanced radio resource management technology to significantly reduce the interference between sectors and cells. It uses a virtual server connected to a large number of base stations through Ethernet. Working in real-time environment, the virtual server receives LTE radio channel information (from all connected base stations simultaneously and sends back most optimal radio resource allocation pattern. Thus all BTS in the LTE network work in coordination to provide best QoS for every user. It boasts up to double the number of users than conventional LTE networks, and based on figures from Korea Telecom Samsung claims OPEX and CAPEX reductions of up to 26 per cent. Deutsche Telekom also successfully conducted a Smart LTE Networks trial in Q4 of 2011.

ZTE Corporation: is ZXSDR R8884 RAN

ZTE’s ZXSDR R8884 RAN product was launched in September 2011 and is designed to help operators solve issues around scare spectrum resources, which often means using frequency blocks that are less than optimal. The ZXSDR R8884 RAN can accommodate carrier aggregation, continuous or non-continuous, both in intra-band and inter-band. For example if an operator owns 10MHz frequency band in 1.8GHz and another 10MHz in 2.6GHz, but needs wider band for building LTE network, then ZXSDR R8884 can help to get 20MHz band in total through inter-band carrier aggregation. Thus, more throughput is obtained and less RRU’s are used. ZXSDR R8884 is the only RRU in the industry that can support inter-band carrier aggregation. ZTE is currently working with several operators including Hong Kong CSL, an operator in Russia, China Telecom and China Unicom.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.