Radisys and Fujitsu recently participated in an Infonetics webinar on May 6th titled, ‘Indoor Wireless Solutions: Technologies, Challenges and Backhaul’. It was a pleasure to be joined by my co-presenter, Femi Adeyemi, LTE Architect for Small Cells Solutions at Fujitsu along with Richard Webb, Directing Analyst at Infonetics. Our presentation focused on the challenges around coverage, capacity and data throughput along with network integration considerations for both residential and enterprise environments. We both shared why small cells are an economical solution for indoor coverage and how HetNet is a complementary technology. During the webinar, a number of great questions came and I thought I’d answer a couple of them in this blog:
Would you address if deployment/implementation of small cells has been seen as a ‘major’ challenge by operators both in terms of cost and complexity?
Small cells continue to be a topic of much debate within the telecoms industry as large operators continue to unveil their plans, and data consumption continues to grow. The small cell architecture is based on a scaled down macro base station installed closer to the end user while focusing on creating a cell within a cell to take the base station functionality.
Mobile subscribers are continuing to demand ubiquitous coverage in indoor locations, thus operators are turning to combination of Wi-Fi and wireless coverage in densely populated areas to meet data demands. It’s therefore not surprising that we are seeing a greater synergy emerge between small cells and Wi-Fi. We now have multi-mode access points combining WiFi and LTE/3G, which deliver more control for operators on how they manage the available radio access resources. This synergy can also deliver a cost saving for deployments and site acquisitions as Wi-Fi and small cells come under the same enclosure.
Do the presenters believe C-RAN and Centralized BBU are the future? Does it mean small cell model is just a temporary solution?
Not really, the RAN evolution takes the network towards a HetNet architecture. To meet the data demand and the coverage needs, multitude of solutions are being explored, ranging from the RRH to small cells to the macro base stations. Each playing a significant role in overall network evolution. The C-RAN brings in the flexibility to decouple the radio and RF from the base band processing and allocates the resources as and when needed from a centralized pool, thus enabling better use of processing power and improved coordination between base stations. The next generation deployments will combine the ease of capacity addition via small cells with the ‘cloudification’ via C-RAN to work in tandem.
To Listen to the Webinar recording – click here. I also welcome any comments or additional questions you may have, so please feel free to contact me at renuka.bhalerao@radisys.com
