Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile Investigate Cloud-based RAN

Alcatel-Lucent and China Mobile will jointly launch technical and economic studies and investigate the technologies essential to build a centralized, collaborative, Cloud-based RAN (C-RAN), such as Alcatel-Lucent’s recently-announced lightRadio. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been signed by China Mobile Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell, Alcatel-Lucent’s flagship company in China.

lightRadio represents a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its components elements and distributed through the antenna or the network for cloud-like processing. Additionally the various cell site tower antennas are combined and shrunk into a single small powerful, Bell Labs-pioneered multi frequency, multi standard (2G, 3G, LTE) device that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.http://www.alcatel-lucent.com