Icera Semiconductor, the Bristol wireless chip company, says it has developed a technology which, it is claimed, can triple user data rate and cell site network efficiency.
Icera calls the technology IceClear, and describes it as an 'interference-aware' receiver technology. Ice Clear uses signal processing algorithms implemented in software to cancel the effect of interference from other cells.
Interference-aware receiver technology has been known to achieve substantial user throughput and cell capacity gains for some time, but until now has been prohibitively complex and expensive to implement. IceClear delivers this technology in software at no additional silicon cost.
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'IceClear(provides material gains in user throughput right across the cell site but with particularly high gains towards the cell edge', says Icera, 'in representative tests, where one dominant interfering cell limits user throughput to a few hundred kilobits per second, IceClear multiplies the throughput by a factor of up to 3.6 times.'
" Mobile network operators are focusing on and differentiating themselves through the quality and consistency of their mobile broadband services", says Steve Allpress, CTO of Icera, "they can now look forward to delivering dramatically improved user data rates on their existing networks in a matter of weeks. This means that true mobile broadband can now be a reality for cellular users, irrespective of where in the network they happen to be."
Until now, the mobile broadband user experience has tapered from the high headline rates achieved when the user is close to the base station, to much lower data speeds at the cell edge.
Previously, the data throughput has been further seriously limited at the cell edge due to interference, referred to as dominant interference power, from signals of the same frequency and of similar strength, transmitted by adjacent cell sites.
The use of current generation equaliser and diversity technology in mobile broadband chip-sets materially improved user data rates compared with earlier rake receiver systems, however data rates remained poor at the cell edge in loaded networks.
Hardware-based methods of cancelling the dominant interference sources require additional complex and silicon-hungry signal processing algorithms. For these cost and complexity reasons, no other mainstream HSPA chipsets have delivered interference cancellation technologies in production products to date.
Unlike any other baseband technology, Icera's Adaptive Wireless baseband executes the entire modem in software on a specific high performance processor. This approach produces a unique flexibility to develop and implement advanced algorithms, which can adapt dynamically to specific channel conditions, in software, without the need to add any extra silicon blocks to the chip.
IceClear is included in the latest version of Icera's Adaptive Wireless soft modem providing an enhancement to customers with what is already independently recognised as the industry's top-performing HSPA mobile broadband technology