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January 06, 2014

InterDigital and Blu Wireless Make Small Cell Breakthrough

Two big names in the wireless infrastructure space, InterDigital and Blu Wireless Technology, have successfully completed the first phase of a collaborative development that may ultimately help network operators better manage high-bandwidth network traffic. The collaboration revolves around exploring millimeter wave solutions for small cell base stations and access points.

Likely due to the success of this first phase, the companies are currently discussing an extension to their collaboration.

“This project builds on a previous, successful collaboration with InterDigital,” said Henry Nurser, CEO of Blu Wireless Technology, in a statement. “The combination of the two research teams will enable a significant advance in the application of low-cost millimetre wave technology within the 4G and 5G mobile infrastructure markets and result in innovative system solutions for our customers.”

The resulting demonstration platform is expected to enable operators to better evaluate small cell base stations and access points, allowing them to more cost effectively increase 4G and 5G backhaul throughput. In other words, this collaborative development may allow operators to satisfy their customers’ increasing demands for data without breaking the bank.

Seeing as how small cells are largely considered to be, along with Wi-Fi offload, the key to handling further mobile data usage, it seems InterDigital and Blu Wireless are onto something significant.

Furthermore, this collaborative development is said to be well suited to research and development exploration for 5G millimeter wave mobile access. It accomplishes this through a combination of InterDigital’s multi-hop backhaul technology and Blu Wireless’ HYDRA baseband evaluation platform, which was developed for 802.11ad Wi-Fi (WiGig) systems and has been optimised further in order to speed throughput in backhaul applications.

“We have been impressed by the flexibility shown by the HYDRA System IP and excited by its potential,” said Jim Nolan, EVP of Innovation Labs at InterDigital. “I look forward to a next phase of research focused on the technical challenges associated with 4G small cell backhaul and 5G networks.”




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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