Digital baseband unit and radio frequency platform provide path to NFV and 5G
The LTE RAN portfolio aims to address the biggest challenge mobile operators will face in the near-future — the ability to meet demand for capacity-consuming data services such as video.
In particular, the company’s latest 9926 eNodeB — comprising a digital baseband unit and RF platform — provides the flexibility to utilize existing radio spectrum and deliver the high-bandwidth LTE services needed to meet increasing demand. In the process, it allows operators to increase capacity and improve spectrum utilization more efficiently, while simplifying deployments and lowering costs.
The digital baseband unit (BBU) will help operators balance operational costs while meeting increased demands by consuming 50% less energy and almost tripling existing capacity — supporting up to 24 radio cells and 16,000 users in one unit. Supporting both LTE-TDD and LTE-FDD 4G technologies, the baseband unit can be deployed with existing BBUs, allowing operators to maximise existing investments in radio access technology. The baseband unit has also been designed to allow operators to deploy a centralized network architecture, providing a smooth evolutionary path towards next-generation networks, including the implementation of virtualized RAN — or vRAN infrastructure — as well as the eventual launch of 5G networks.
The portfolio’s RF platform is offered in an ergonomic, modular design optimized in terms of size, power, bandwidth, performance and reliability. Using common hardware and software assets across spectrum bands, it allows for simple adaptation to meet specific customer needs, reducing time-to-market and leveraging innovation developed for other bands or configurations. Wideband capabilities allow operators to utilize fragmented spectrum, covering entire bands with one radio, while remote software configuration of transmission modes means it can easily and quickly be adapted in the field to meet changing market demands and traffic patterns.
The Alcatel-Lucent 9926 eNodeB digital baseband unit (BBU) introduces two new boards, both based on Freescale’s® QorIQ Qonverge™ B4860 base station-on-chip SoC and supports up to 24 cells (fully loaded at 20 MHz) in a compact d2U chassis. This is an increase in capacity over previous generation BBUs by 260%, while consuming up to 50% less power. The BBU supports RAN sharing business models and is optimized for LTE-A, supporting carrier aggregation across FDD and TDD modes. It is backwards-compatible with Alcatel-Lucent’s existing BBU chassis and current generation boards and is forwards-compatible with virtualized RAN architectures and BBU pooling.
The RF platform provides common building block assets across the TDD and the FDD radio units allows faster time-to-market. It features power amplifier and filter technology designed to fit common interfaces allowing rapid development of new frequencies and band retuning, while a small form factor, standardized interfaces across radios and reduced weight making it easy to install on site. Wideband/dual band capabilities provide support for multi-carrier or multi-band deployments in a single unit. Remote software configuration of transmission modes (2T2R, 4T4R, 8T8R) enables operators to meet changing market demands.
The high output power of the radio platform (up to 160-W) and wide bandwidth supported (up to 194 MHz) greatly increases deployment flexibility. PIM-free blind mate connections allow operators to easily mix and match radios to support different active antenna configurations. The radio platform provides cost-effective support for optimized low power RF interfaces to Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and supports RAN sharing business models. Further, soft fail redundancy in the power amplifier is provided in the event that one fails.
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