Official information from Alcatel-Lucent: (http://all.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal/cf/lightradio#tabAnchor1) From around 2009~2010, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs starts ‘GreenTouch‘ focusing on eco-sustainable networks, enabling a low carbon economy, innovation and engagement, reducing Alcatel-Lucent’s carbon footprint. In 2011, as a response to that ‘Green’, ‘LightRadio’ is invented as a real thing.
As a challenge to traditional RAN (radio access network, including base station and antennas), the main difference of LR (short of LightRadio) is the ability to dynamic deployment – hanging on street signs or anywhere there is power and broadband connection, and taking advantages of ‘cloud’, comparing with RAN’s static configuration – not easy to move and special place to install, and its non-distributed way of computing provided by base station. Even though there is detailed data of LR published, we could figure out the reason its facing LTE – using MIMO – the key technology of antenna in LTE. That’s why we could zip LR into your hand. When we take a consideration of ‘cloud’ part, it is easy to find there would be a new distribute computing architecture of management of these LRs covering the whole network instead of per base station – This is a higher level of management which should provide more intelligence, better and faster solutions, like a network level of load balance, for example. However, there is also one question left for us – Is this ‘cloud’ provided by LTE core network (like MME) or reusing/leasing public/special IT ‘cloud’ or there may be a new ‘cloud’ constructed by Carrier itself. Whatever the answer is, ‘cloud’ is stepping into telecommunication indeed.
Alcatel, China Mobile partner to develop enhanced RAN
Telecompaper – Feb 15 2011
Alcatel-Lucent has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with China Mobile for the development of enhanced radio access network (RAN). Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile will jointly launch technical and economic studies and investigate the technologies essential to build a centralised, collaborative, Cloud-based RAN (C-RAN) in order to set standards for network intelligence and energy-efficiency. The C-RAN will provide a common platform for multi-mode wireless standards such as GSM, 3G, and LTE.
The partnership for C-RAN will use Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio, an innovation in mobile and broadband infrastructure for mobile networks. lightRadio, an architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each mobile site tower, is broken into its components elements and distributed through the antenna or the network for cloud-like processing. Additionally the various mobile site tower antennas are combined and shrunk into a single, Bell Labs-pioneered multi frequency, multi standard (2G, 3G, LTE) device that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.