Femtocell grows up and sets its sights on the Cloud-RAN

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Femtocell grows up and sets its sights on the Cloud-RAN

As Nokia set the scene, the week before Mobile World Congress, for many of the mobile apps conversations at the event, so Alcatel-Lucent performed tha

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 21 February, 2011

As Nokia set the scene, the week before Mobile World Congress, for many of the mobile apps conversations at the event, so Alcatel-Lucent performed that role for the access network. Its lightRadio roadmap looks to deconstruct the traditional RAN in a way that has been discussed endlessly, but not articulated in quite such a unified (some might say impossible over-neat) way. In focusing on flexible cell sizes, including very small; integrated antenna/radio devices with baseband processing remote or in the cloud; and base stations shrunk down to single-chip architectures, ALU was highlighting themes that were critical to MWC. It became clearer than ever before that LTE networks would be built differently to their predecessors – more cheaply, more densely, more flexibly, and with a huge degree of self-organization. With carriers looking to deploy these new-style systems at an early stage, and some examples already out there (especially in Japan), MWC 2011 saw the small cell conversations moving off the slide decks, and out of the living rooms, into real products for real carrier roll-outs.

Several trends have fed into this notion of a deconstructed network and, eventually, a ‘Cloud RAN’. One, rising availability of fiber backhaul (essential, ALU admits, for first wave deployments of lightRadio). Two, the need to map capacity more accurately to demand, whether with dense hotzones for highly populated areas, or flexible networks that can organize themselves around different times of day. Three, the increasing sophistication of those SON (self-organizing network) tools, and their incorporation in LTE standards. Four, the huge recent growth in adoption of remote radio heads in 3G and 4G networks, and the shift towards the next stage, where the antenna and radio are fully integrated (as shown by Ericsson just before MWC).

And five, and perhaps most importantly, the femtocell. This may have started life looking like the latest consumer electronics gadget to clutter up the living room, but for all its usefulness in the home – improving signal quality, supporting homezone pricing and apps, allowing for carrier offload from the macro network – it had ideas well above its station. The tiny base station showed how the economics of the whole carrier network could be changed once its architecture could be shrunk onto a single chip and a high degree of self-management introduced. As operators looked to far smaller cells outdoors, to bring the base station closer to the user and add capacity at relatively low cost, the femtocell concept crept up the base station chain.

At this point, indoor femtos are entering the mainstream, with major deployments by carriers like Vodafone and AT&T. Some of these are still mainly geared to improved coverage inside, but others are showing signs of the femto’s real disruptive potential in terms of how networks are designed. Softbank in Japan, for instance, has given away femtos and the DSL lines that backhaul them, but kept the base stations public access, which has resulted in a rapid expansion of its coverage as well as significant churn to its network. And Simon Saunders, chair of the Femto Forum, points out that Network Norway, which went live this month, is one of the first to build a network with femtocells in the front line, and a fully fledged self-organizing grid. The mobile-only service is targeted at business buildings and uses products from NEC.

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