Alcatel-Lucent unveiled a new way to build mobile networks, at an event in London. The company's lightRadio system claims to cut the total cost of ownership for operators by up to 50 percent, while boosting bandwidth available to end-users by creating a more dense network of small antennas. The LightRadio architecture breaks up the base station into its components elements and distributes its functions into the antenna and a 'carrier cloud' for network control. The former base station components are moved to a system on a chip, placing the processing either at the antenna or in the cloud. The SoC was jointly developed with Freescale Semiconductor. The network is based around the multi-frequency, multi-standard Wideband Active Array Antenna, which can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection. The lightRadio Cube, the core antenna technology developed by Bell Labs, includes a diplexer type, radio, amplifier, and passive cooling in a small cube that fits in the palm of the hand. For the controllers and gateways, the company is working with virtualisation software and companies like HP to enable a cloud-like wireless architecture. Alcatel-Lucent said network costs are lower thanks to fewer fibre pairs required to support the traffic between the antenna and the centralized processing in the cloud. In addition to the antenna, which will trial later this year and be available in 2012, the lightRadio system includes a Multiband Remote Radio Head, Baseband Unit, Controller, and the 5620 SAM common management system. Additional product family members are planned for 2012, 2013 and 2014.
