Alcatel-Lucent has taken the veil off a new network technology that leverages cloud computing and smaller base stations and cell towers.
The company's lightRadio technology reduces the cell site to just the antenna by moving base station components to a system on a chip so that processing can be done where it best fits in the network, whether on the antenna or in the "cloud-like" network Alcatel-Lucent envisions as part of the technology.
"The base station as we know it will somewhat disappear," says Jean-Pierre Lartigue, vice president of marketing at Alcatel-Lucent.
Alcatel-Lucent's lightRadio system employs a variety of cell sites, from picocells to macrocells.
The antenna for the system, the lightRadio Cube, was developed by Bell Labs and is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The Cube includes a diplexer type radio, amplifier and passive cooling. Alcatel-Lucent says the antenna uses vertical beam-forming that improves the capacity in urban and suburban sites by about 30 percent.
"You need small cells to be much more surgical in coverage of specific areas – you need a continuum of cell sizes," Lartigue says. "We bring together technology that allows the macro cells to be distributed and repurposed along with the small cells."
LightRadio's system-on-a-chip technology was developed with Freescale Semiconductor, and Alcatel-Lucent is working with HP on a cloud-like wireless architecture for controllers and gateways.
LightRadio is set up to use renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, and can use microwave backhaul. The equipment used for lightRadio is much smaller than that used for current wireless networks.
Alcatel-Lucent says the new technology requires about half the electricity of current radio access technology, and cuts down maintenance costs on cell sites. The company claims the lightRadio system can cut the total cost of ownership for mobile networks by half.
The wideband active array antenna for the lightRadio system handles 2G,3G and LTE technologies simultaneously and is lightweight enough to be mounted on poles or sides of buildings, provided there is a power source and a broadband connection.
The product family includes the antenna, a multiband remote radio head, baseband processor, radio control and is managed by Alcatel-Lucent's 5620-SAM technology. The system will be ready for customer trials in the second half of this year, with general availability slated for 2012. Additional products for lightRadio will come out over the next three years.
Alcatel-Lucent said it is working to set up trials with "five of the largest carriers on the globe, covering all regions" and announced today that it would be working with China Mobile. The company will provide further details on its lightRadio technology at Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona.