Cavium Continuous Computing and Picochip today unveiled the industry’s first demonstration of a Long Term Evolution small-cell operating in an end-to-end system with commercially available user equipment and core network equipment.
The companies’ joint exhibit at this year’s Femtocells World Summit shows full interoperation between the Picochip PC960x LTE small cell solution, incorporating Trillium LTE protocol stack software from Continuous Computing running on a Cavium OCTEON processor, LTE dongles using Cavium’s Odyssey 9000 UE chipsets and an LTE evolved packet core (EPC) supplied by a worldwide leader in networking.
The demonstration, which is on show at the Cisco booth (Number 18) at Femtocells World Summit 2011, follows on from the precedent-setting 3G-interoperability demo involving Cisco, Continuous Computing and Picochip, which took place at Femtocells World Summit 2009. It enables web browsing, voice-over-IP (VoIP) calling and video streaming via the packet core.
Femtocells and picocells (or, more generally, ‘small cells’) improve mobile voice and data service at business and residential customer premises, in metropolitan hot zones and in sparsely populated rural areas. They are already becoming key components of 3G networks and will play a pivotal role in the deployment of LTE.
“We’re delighted to have successfully demonstrated that our LTE solution is both capable and compatible,” said Nigel Toon, Picochip CEO. “Our system-level approach to LTE basestation design gives our customers a low-risk route to market that our competitors simply cannot offer. Our solution is complete and carrier-class; demonstrating interoperability with other vendors’ commercial products is the best possible proof of the power of our offering.”
“Continuous Computing has 21 LTE customer wins and 30 femtocell customer wins, making us a clear leader in LTE and small cell basestation solutions,” said Manish Singh, VP of Product Line Management at Continuous Computing. “Building on the success two years ago of our interoperability demo with Picochip and Starent Networks (now part of Cisco) and our industry-first LTE Small Cell Reference Design with Picochip and Cavium in 2010, we lead by example when it comes to demonstrating femtocell ecosystem interoperability.”
“Our companies are committed to accelerating the deployment of LTE with full featured femtocell, picocell and end user devices,” said Raj Singh, General Manager, Wireless Broadband Group at Cavium. “These results demonstrate the proven reality of open market small cells using our commercial LTE dongle UE devices and OCTEON multi-core processors for the small cell base station along with freely available core network equipment delivering high performance. Our joint efforts will give more confidence to network equipment manufacturers and carriers about deploying a fully interoperable and pre-tested system.”
Picochip’s PC960x is a complete basestation reference design in a µTCA chassis that occupies a physical space of around four liters. It integrates a radio, PHY and Continuous Computing’s protocol stacks running on a Cavium OCTEON processor into a complete system, with end-to-end testing and quality. It supports all the standard modes of LTE, with both TD-LTE and FDD variants, and provides a smooth evolution path to future versions of the standard including LTE-Advanced (LTE-A).
The Odyssey 9000 chipsets for LTE are the latest in a series of uniquely designed multi-protocol products from Cavium featuring CAT-3 performance (100Mb/s downlink, 50Mb/s uplink) for user equipment such as USB dongles, data cards, mobile handsets and tablets/MIDs with market leading low-power, flexibility and price/performance. The Odyssey family also supports all the LTE modes, with 10MHz, 20MHz, TD-LTE and FDD support. The programmable PHY architecture allows the Odyssey 9000 series to support existing LTE bands as well as future bands that are ratified by the 3GPP. This flexibility allows complete freedom of deployment for operators worldwide.
Trillium LTE wireless protocol software addresses LTE Femtocells (Home eNodeB) and pico / macro eNodeBs as well as the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) Mobility Management Entity (MME), Serving Gateway (SWG), Evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG), etc. These standards-based Trillium LTE wireless protocols allow customers to rapidly develop LTE infrastructure to compete for early design wins in the dynamic LTE marketplace.
Filed Under: Industrial automation
