We may be a few samples short of declaring a trend, but
outdoor small cells appear to have started their (long-anticipated) emergence
from concept into deployment. Looking at just the North American market, the FCC
has adopted measures to speed up the environmental review process to
make it easier to deploy small cells in the urban environment and service
operators are now talking about their actual small cell deployments – the
recent press coverage of Verizon’s deployments in San
Francisco and Cleveland
giving great examples. All the indications are that small cells are here to
stay as part of an operator’s tool-kit for capacity expansion.
Network planning will dictate where the small cells need to
be deployed – and in most cases, that location is not going to be convenient
for fiber backhaul. Service operators will have to rely extensively on wireless
backhaul to meet their deployment goals. In tightly packed urban environments
where the cell density is highest, the arguments for backhaul in the 60GHz band
- 7GHz of spectrum, license-free deployment, good spectrum reuse and low
interference – are compelling.
So, what are the ideal characteristics of a small cell
wireless backhaul link? The units must be small and light enough to be
installed on street furniture such as traffic lights and lamp posts. Since
installation may involve shutting down a city street, the links should be
self-aligning so that they can be installed quickly without any training and be
virtually maintenance-free thereafter. Finally, the units must be cheap enough
to be deployed in the thousands in a single city deployment.
We’ve known for a long time that phase array antenna and
electronic beam-steering technology provides a most elegant way to create
backhaul links with these characteristics. Nodes are small, light, consume
little power and can be built at low cost. The links are dynamic, reducing
installation and maintenance costs and opening up the possibility of new
network architectures. The technology is simple in concept but technically
challenging to implement in practice and until recently there have been not
been any real-world examples that showcase the technology.
So what’s different now? This spring, you can see the first
results of the application of SiBEAM’s phase array and beam-steering technology
to wireless backhaul. We’ve been working with our partner, Blu Wireless
Technology to integrate our 60GHz phase array RF transceiver
together with their baseband within their Lightning demonstrator grade
evaluation platform. These platforms have been installed as part of the Bristol is Open experimental network (we’ve
included pictures of the installation around Bristol harbor in the UK) to
demonstrate gigabit-speed wireless mesh networking for dynamic data backhaul
applications. This is the first mesh network trial in Europe to use 60GHz and
OpenFlow software defined networking.
Experimental networks such as Bristol is Open are exciting indicators of the potential for 60GHz
wireless to solve operators’ data backhaul challenges.
© Lattice Semiconductor
© Lattice Semiconductor
