HetNet Strategies with Oi Brazil

Brazil has been in limelight since the beginning of the year. Initially, the focus was on how the FIFA World Cup may fail but later on for the way everything came together at the last minute and everything worked. From a technology point of view, WiFi was a big saviour in the stadiums, allowing good connectivity for everyone wishing to add the things they liked on social networks as soon as they can.

An example was this chart tweeted by Ruckus Wireless to proudly show what their achievement was with stadium WiFi.

Recently, Maravedis-rethink conducted a webinar with the Brazilian operator Oi, regarding their HetNet strategies. The video for the relevant part is embedded in the end. Two slides caught my attention. The first was about the different technologies and their concerns (above). For example for a HetNet to be successful, all components should synchronised and have a strict time accuracy requirements. The Backhaul & Fronthaul requirements are equally interesting for different cases.

The second interesting slide is the final one where they have their wish list to what they would like to do in near-term and long-term. WiFi features in all the scenarios except for the rural case (as expected). Anyway, here is the video:



You can download the slides from Slideshare here.

Airvana's OneCell™ with C-RAN and Super-cell

Airvana recently announced its OneCell™ system was named the winner in the “In-Building Wireless – Small Cell, Wi-Fi, LAN” category of CTIA’s annual Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Awards competition. I remember back in June, it received a lot of praise for this product. So what exactly is so unique in this OneCell™.

From their press release back in June:

Based on cloud RAN principles, the OneCell system consists of a Baseband Controller and multiple Radio Points. Together they form a single "super" cell that delivers consistently high quality LTE service across indoor spaces ranging from 50,000 to 1,000,000 square feet without handovers or inter-cell interference issues. OneCell supports plug-and-play deployment over standard Ethernet cabling and switches, eliminating the need for proprietary networks or expensive optical links. Further, its unique small cell cloud RAN architecture dramatically simplifies radio frequency planning and integration with wireless macro networks.

There is a mention of C-RAN (though I have had discussion where this claims have been disputed), Super-cell and is pitched towards enterprises.

Airvana's website has a good picture explaining how a super-cell gets rid of interference on cell edges as all the cells work together as a single large cell.

In fact the scheduler can cleverly assign the same resource blocks to different users and hence increase capacity.

Below is a video explaining their solution in more details:

Wi-Fi Evolution and its Role in 5G Networks

Picture Source: EE Times Asia

'5G' is becoming a  very popular term. Every other day there is some sort of a press release about some company working on a 5G technology. Those who follow my blogs will nevertheless know that I think there will be an intermediate stage which we term as 4.5G where Wi-Fi and Cellular will work together, in harmony.

While the Release-12 of 3GPP standards have been focussing on many areas, the headline grabbing technology has been Carrier Aggregation (CA). 3 bands CA in the downlink and 2 band CA in the uplink is expected to become a norm. New UE categories 9 and 10 have been defined for this.

While 802.11n, 802.11ac and 802.11ad is now starting to gain popularity, discussion about the next generation of Wi-Fi standards, 802.11ax has just begun.

I recently came across an interesting presentation from Ericsson on this topic and I think it may be worth watching. The presentation is available here and video of the presentation is embedded below:


There are lots of other talks and presentations from the Johannesberg Summit 2014 that is available here.