看看小型蜂窝基站有什么独家新闻？

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看看小型蜂窝基站有什么独家新闻？ [复制链接]

Kyle Harper，TI无线基站基础设施业务部营销经理
3G 过渡到 4G 的过程中，运营商必须将基础设施从话音/数据类信息传送转变为以多媒体/娱乐信息传递为主的拓樸。小型蜂窝基站在过渡期间发挥关键作用，预计未来的 5～7 年里将超越宏蜂窝基站的数量。

 

One of Texas Instruments’ fastest growing businesses is silicon-based solutions for customers in the mobile infrastructure industry – the portion of the telecommunications and networking industry that provides voice and data services wirelessly to the world’s ever-increasing variety of mobile devices. Year after year more TI devices show up inside the world’s cellular base station towers, as worldwide data traffic and smartphone usage continues to grow through the roof.

Today, a frequently discussed segment of this business is small cells. The number of small cell base stations is expected to eclipse the number of macro cell base stations within the next five to seven years. So, the next time you’re using a smartphone or a mobile tablet device to view a YouTube video or scan a map in search of the cheapest gas station prices, that very same mobile device might be receiving its data directly from a small cell instead of a traditional large macro cell base station.

What’s the difference between a small cell and macro cell?
For a long time, the “killer apps” that a mobile operator needed to provide users support with have been scarcely more than voice calling, texting and email browsing – all of which are provided economically to many users via a large “macro” cell with a large base station radio tower located at its center. These large antenna towers provide coverage in a macro cell up to 20 or 30 kilometers (km) wide, and are now familiar sights alongside a road or even attached to the top or side of a building. Macro cells also come in smaller sizes in the form of micro cells and compact base stations, each type covering a smaller diameter cell.

If mobile network operators have their way, serving up all the media and data on a mobile device from a small cell will cost them less. In addition to lower costs for operators, a small cell for a consumer means faster support for phone calls, video streaming and web surfing. From a visual standpoint, small cells also blend more easily into landscapes than macro base stations. So far, the only small cells deployed by operators have been very compact consumer or customer-premises equipment (CPE) radio boxes called residential femto cells. Residential femto cells are individually installed in residences or office buildings, wherever there is a cellular phone “dead zone” problem and a consumer is willing to pay for a box and provide internet service to that box.

The trouble today is that the new “killer apps” on mobile devices involve full-on web surfing, video streaming and map-enabled mobile commerce – all of which routinely outstrip the data capacity of an operator’s grid of 3G macro cells, micro cells and compact base stations. Part of an operator’s solution to this unprecedented wireless data deluge is to upgrade to 4G’s LTE internet packet-based protocol. LTE is needed to support and keep up with the voracious wireless data appetite of new killer apps so that consumers’ calls don’t get dropped, downloads don’t fail and videos don’t stutter.

But an upgrade to LTE alone is not enough. It is necessary to somehow bring the base station closer to each and every user, and the best way to do that is with small cells. As the transition to LTE completes over the next few years, every mobile operator’s homogeneous topology of macro, micro and compact base stations will be heavily fortified with a heterogeneous mix of small cell base stations, ranging from outdoor pico and metro cells, to indoor enterprise and residential cells. This next generation of small cells is less about filling in those voice call dead zones, and more about delivering data and media, thereby offloading this type of traffic from the macro cell grid. The new mix of base station topology is needed so that a mobile operator can efficiently use and monetize its scarcest resource, radio spectrum, efficiently while providing voice, internet and entertainment reliably and economically anytime and anywhere consumers need it. Adding cost-effective and aesthetically pleasing small cells into the mix offers operators a great solution to avoid data coverage gaps.

What can an operator do to provide increased data bandwidth to each of us?
In the final analysis, there are only so many bits of data transfer available in any given mobile cell’s coverage area. Furthermore, a cell’s total transfer bandwidth must be shared by all active users in that cell. One way to provide larger chunks of data bandwidth for each user is to reduce the number of users being served by each cell, thereby giving each user a bigger slice of the cell’s pie: data packets. In the overlay of 4G/LTE alongside 3G in each macro cell, operators will be able to deliver more data per user, although the data rate and quality experienced by users at the outer range of these macro cells can be less than those closer to the center of the cell. This doesn’t make for happy users, though, so operators are planning how best to supplement their existing macro cells. This is where small cells come into play. Small cells fill these gaps nicely and less expensively than macro and compact base stations.

Small cells to the rescue
Small cell installations come in a variety of form factors, including small outdoor cell installations such as pico and metro cells, and small indoor cell installations such as enterprise and residential femto cells. What all these small cell installation types have in common are:

    * Radius cell coverage areas significantly smaller than macro, micro or compact base stations (making them better suited to fill in small gaps);
    * Substantially smaller form factors that are easily hidden or masked from the public view;
    * Considerably lower costs to install and operate.

The pico and metro outdoor cell installations have larger cell ranges, and thus are designed to handle more users than the smaller-range enterprise and residential indoor cell installations. Also, utility costs for operating outdoor installations are paid by the operators, whereas the utility costs for operating indoor femto cells are paid by the individual owner.

Small cells introduce the potential for more adjacent cell interference exposure, so operators are trying to understand better the performance characteristics for users on the edges of these smaller cells, and how to minimize such interference. This is an area Texas Instruments has focused a lot of its best expertise on, and customers recognize this.

In going from 3G to 4G, operators will transform their infrastructure from a voice/data-class delivery topology to a multimedia/entertainment-class delivery topology. It will be optimized for today’s very diverse set of users and use-cases. And it will require an overlay of small cells onto operators’ existing macro cells topology, allowing operators and users alike to enjoy higher data bandwidth via better radio spectral efficiency, and spectral reuse.

 

来源TI :http://focus.ti.com.cn/cn/general/docs/bcg/bcgviewnewsletter.tsp?templateId=6116&navigationId=12070&contentId=139972&sp_rid_pod4=NjU0NjY2MzEzOQS2&sp_mid_pod4=37200310