Base Station on the palm of your hand
Here is a paradigm shifting technology from Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)… lightRadio. A Base Station that fits in the palm of your hand. It’s generating bold, disruptive titles such as: “The tiny cube that could save wireless”, “lightRadio shoves a base station in a box”, “End of Mobile Towers?” – and they are all legitimate claims or predictions.
Even bigger news is that is not a concept anymore. Telefonica, whose customers are in 25 countries across Europe and Latin America, announced the first live test of the 4G network over lightRadio, and the cube was supporting 1,000 users at the last Mobile World Congress of 2012 in Barcelona in February.
I am illustrating some basic configuration block diagram of lightRadio cube based on the information provided by ALU.
Good Stuff:
Following are just a few of the benefits of using lightRadio:
- Lowers power consumption by improving coverage: Reduces energy consumption of mobile networks by up to 50% over current network.
- Ubiquity: Enables easy creation of broadband coverage virtually anywhere there is power (electricity, sun, wind) by using microwave to connect back to the network.
- Reduced cost of ownership: can lead to a reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile networks up to 50%
- Many backhaul options: back haul, lightRadio can be used with IP, fiber, microwave backhaul, DSL and Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) copper backhaul.
- Improve capacity up to 30 percent with vertical beamforming: lightRadio can dynamically direct RF signal exactly where it is needed based on changes in cell loading and traffic density. It does it by using smart active antenna arrays (AAAs) that deliver multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) gains and sophisticated beamforming in a very small footprint.
- Technology support: Offer remotely programmable baseband processing that supports different GSM, W-CDMA, and LTE traffic mixes on the same digital hardware.
- Plethora of innovations: combines innovations in antennas, radios and baseband processing with support for virtualization, cloud principles and architectural flexibility
- Software defined: lightRadio allows easy reconfiguration and software reprogramming of network elements. Plug and play, Self Organizing, Self Optimizing
ALU mentions that lightRadio will offer uniform indoor user experience due to fully digital antenna beam forming, providing 60%-80% indoor coverage at 64 QAM. That's great... but where we do need indoor coverage, will it be feasible to reap all the benefits of lightRadio platform for in-building wireless coverage? It depends. Here are some of my thoughts:
- Areas needed for DAS head-end is hard to find and can be premier real-estate when you find them. With the usage of lightRadio (even just in head-end area) we can easily reduce square footage need to 25% of what we need today - that's a 75% or more space reduction. This however, assumes that all the RF sources from different carriers are using lightRadio platform.
- Due to superior sets of features, lightRadio will become a disruptive competitor for Femto and Micro Cell solutions in the inbuilding-arena. With 5 watt or 37 dBm composite output, it can be a great solution for a lot of Enterprise cellular coverage solution - without the need for fiber based DAS. This could easily take care of a lot of in-building with coverage requirement of 200,000 sq. ft. or less.
- We don't know the price of this lightRadio solution. Will it make financial sense to use lightRadio for smaller in-building solution? Depends on the Cost to Coverage Area (C2C) ratio offered by lightRadio compared to what we will get from
- For neutral host DAS solutions, we may still have to depend on the traditional DAS network for years to come. Unless all the carriers start using this technology, we may not be able to take advantage of lightRadio technology to its fullest (e.g., we will miss out on the advantage of Active Antenna Array's beam forming feature).
- With lightRadio we may see newer hybrid type solution becoming more popular. That means the demarcation between outdoor cell site and indoor DAS may fade.
- So far we know that HP and Freescale partnering with ALU on architecture end, we have not heard of partnership with any of DAS manufacturers.
- If we connect a lightRadio to a traditional and popular DAS Head-end (such as MobileAccess, SOLiD, Andrew, etc.) as a RF source, Would we see partnership between ALU and DAS manufacturers? Or would we see ALU coming up with its line of DAS solutions?
- lightRadio moves the former basestation components to a System on a Chip (SOC). This contributes heavily towards reducing the footprint. With this same paradigm we may see DAS manufacturers coming up with creative and innovative DAS solutions with much smaller footprint. After all, with the lightRadio in your hand, even a regular repeater will look like a dinosaur.
For more information, check out the following articles:
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