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.