Wireless infrastructure company Dali Wireless said it has successfully completed an initial field trial of dynamic capacity allocation, which it says is the world’s first.
The field trial for dynamic resource allocation was held in Singapore with telecom provider NCS, which is part of Singtel Group. It relied on Dali’s RF Router platform, which has centralized capacity that is dynamically doled out as needed, with the goal of only using resources as needed so as to reduce the total cost of infrastructure ownership – much the same idea as is being touted in the broader industry discussion around software-defined networking. Network flexibility, and the ability to move network capacity and resources as needed on an efficient, cost-effective basis has been a holy grail for the industry and continues to be an area of significant research and focus with the continued evolution of the cloud radio access network concept – although it should be noted that Dali doesn’t see its RF Router as exactly equivalent to a C-RAN, given its examination of cost of ownership for RF Router compared to a C-RAN set-up.
Nick Marshall, research director at ABI Research, responded to the news with a blog post that noted that Dali’s solution “builds on the C-RAN architecture of the [distributed antenna system] to dynamically and autonomously allocate capacity to where and when it is needed. The benefit of such an architecture is that the total cost of ownership for the system operator is lowered when compared to conventional or legacy DAS systems because the need to systematically over-provision the system has been removed.”
For its part, Dali said that traditional DAS requires operators to support the peak load for individual service areas that may have very high usage, without much flexibility to re-allocate or move capacity around as needed. It says its RF Router platform leverages networking techniques and proprietary technologies that aren’t utilized by either analog or hybrid-digital DAS.
According to Dali, the use of RF Router means that “regardless of physical distribution network topology (star, chain, hybrid or loop), capacity can be routed from multiple base stations to multiple remote locations – a multipoint-to-multipoint distribution network.” Base stations from different vendors can be used, and both baseband and radio resources can be pooled, with “all the base stations in a base station farm … interconnected physically and logically via a network of RF Routers.”
According to Dali Wireless’ description of the trials, “radio capacity was pooled at a central location through the RF Router, and a mix of live 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE-MIMO signals from the centralized base stations were dynamically allocated to where and when there was a high demand within the trial venue. Since the network can be dynamically configured with software, entire base station sectors can be dedicated to specific high demand areas on-demand or per schedule through the graphical user interface of the Dali Wireless Network Management System. All KPIs were met satisfactorily. In particularly, the high throughput performance KPI confirms Dali’s claims of an almost lossless RF Router-based RF distribution network.”
Wong Soon Nam, VP of Smart and Safe City and Communications Engineering at NCS, said in a statement that the capability “will allow us to ultimately enhance users’ mobile experience while driving down capital and operational expenditure.”
Dali added that the success of the trial “lead us to be invited by NCS to partner them to bid for the latest [common antenna system] project.” The company said that its goal is to be the preferred DAS vendor for operators in the Asia-Pacific region.
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