Nokia has revealed the main features of its new ReefShark chipsets that come with small size, will cut cost and power consumption of telecom operators’ networks and meet the radio needs of 5G.
ReefShark chipsets incorporate Nokia Bell Labs artificial intelligence (AI) innovations as well as Nokia’s capabilities in antenna development for mobile devices and base stations.
The 5G chipset leverage silicon developed by Nokia in Oulu, Espoo and Tampere, Finland as well as Sunnyvale, California.
ReefShark chipsets for radio frequency (RF) units such as the radio used in antennas significantly improve their performance. This results in halving the size of massive MIMO antennas. ReefShark chipsets also reduce power consumption in baseband units by 64 percent, compared to such units in use today.
ReefShark chipsets for compute capacity are delivered as plug-in units for the commercially available Nokia AirScale baseband module. AirScale is software upgradeable to full 5G functionality, and these plug-in units triple throughput from Nokia’s 28 Gbps today, to up to 84 Gbps per module.
Additionally, AirScale baseband module chaining supports base station throughputs of up to 6 terabits per second, which will allow operators to meet the huge growing densification demands and support the massive enhanced mobile broadband needs of people and devices in megacities.
AI in 5G networks enables real-time radio monitoring and optimization and the ability to apply techniques such as network slicing to meet the service level demands of new business cases. Nokia is developing technology with common interfaces and toolkits allowing service providers to implement machine learning applications in their networks.
Nokia is working with 30 operators using ReefShark and will ramp up field deployments during the third quarter of 2018.
Neil McRae, BT Chief Architect, said: “By incorporating ReefShark into our network we will leverage the huge network performance improvements that will allow us to unleash the full potential of 5G.”
Henri Tervonen, CTO of Nokia Mobile Networks and head of R&D Foundation said: “With ReefShark, Nokia has created a clear competitive advantage. Its combination of power, intelligence and efficiency make it ideally suited to be at the heart of fast arriving 5G networks.”
