Nokia Bell Labs today announced a major innovation in small cell technology that can assist telecom network operators to improve performance.
The main benefits of the innovation in small cell technology are flexibility, efficiency and optimized deployment economics.
Telecom network operators — utilizing the innovative small cell technology from Nokia — can speed up the creation of the high capacity and low latency network.
“F-Cell technology eliminates the costly power and backhaul wires and fibers currently required for small cell installation to enable drop and forget small cell deployments,” said Nokia in a statement.
Bell Labs recently demonstrated the world’s first drone-based delivery of an F-Cell to a Nokia office rooftop in Sunnyvale, CA.. The F-Cell wirelessly self-powered, self-configured and auto-connected to the network and instantly began to stream high-definition video.
F-Cell breakthrough is a re-imagining of the network architecture to place key functional elements in optimum locations.
The telecom technology company said F-cell architecture has a closed loop, 64-antenna massive MIMO system placed in a centralized location that is used to form 8 beams to 8 energy autonomous (solar powered) F-Cells.
The company has redesigned F-Cells to require minimum processing power so that the solar panel is no larger than the cell itself. F-Cell technology solves small cell and backhaul cabling, deployment and expense challenges for service providers and enterprises.
The small cell technology architecture supports non-line-of-sight wireless networking in FDD or TDD mode, and the parallel operation of up to 8 individual 20 MHz channels allowing for a system throughput rate of ~1Gbit/s over existing LTE networks.
The Finnish technology company said architecture will scale to enable up to tens of Gbit/s using higher spectral bandwidth, new spectral bands and a larger number antenna arrays.
“F-Cell is a key breakthrough technology to deliver seemingly infinite capacity, imperceptible latency and connectivity to trillions of things,” said Marcus Weldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia CTO.
F-Cell advances Nokia’s Future X Network vision of 100x capacity growth and 100x reduction in latency.
