Wednesday 14 May 2014

Small Cells as a Service (SCaaS) using NFV


If you have not read my earlier post on SCaaS, then check this out. If you have no idea what Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is, check this out.

In a recent presentation in CW, Interdigital suggested that they are working on some ideas where they can virtualize the small cells network in such a way to have multi-tenancy (multiple operators sharing pool of small cells resources). Here is the complete presentation embedded. Let me know what you think.




2 comments:

  1. Manoj Das (via HetNet Linkedin group)15 May 2014 at 07:06

    This is definitely the buzz in the town. A lot of companies including tower and real estate and hospitality companies exploring the feasibility. Only negative aspect I can imagine is: the remote node/ rrh / small cell will be power limited. It means: the power amplifier for certain band would be a fixed number (dBm). the more number of service providers operate in the same band join in the system will have to share the Power output of the Power Amplifier. That would reduce the cell radius.

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  2. I'm not sure I see that the economics of the solution work unless there is band alignment between the various operators. This is the real problem in most markets which is blocking a neutral host approach. This may be why LTE-U is being so heavily promoted by QCA. LTE-U will be an enabler for some level of neutral host services, if it is adopted. Likely just a matter of time. Of course, Wi-Fi is the universal neutral host service and has been for many years.

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