Nokia displays cloud, IoT, 1000x capacity solutions on India Innovation Day

MUMBAI, INDIA: At the recently hosted India Innovation Day in Bengaluru, Nokia showcased cloud, IoT and analytics and 1000x capacity solutions.

Targeted at the mobile broadband segment, these three were among the 30 futuristic technologies and demonstrations on various R&D projects including the company displayed at Nokia Technology Center.

Here’s a sneak peak:

Telco cloud: Operators world-over want to reduce the cost-of-ownership and leverage the benefits of cloud services by moving telecom functions to the cloud.

Nokia has port many parts of its core network, subscriber data management, and IMS (IP Multimedia subsystems) to the cloud.

In addition, there is an evolving trend towards moving base station functionality to the cloud. However, there are significant challenges because of real-time constraints. While the technology is still at the R&D phase, Nokia showcased the advantages of moving the base station functionality to the cloud at the demo center.

Internet of things (IoT) and analytics: Nokia expects billions of small low-cost devices and sensors to be connected to the Internet. A number of new use cases and applications are expected to be enabled by using this technology, including applications such as smart cities, smart metering, eHealth, sensor networks and industrial automation. These devices need to be low-cost and should have a long battery-life so that they need not be charged for several hours.

New technologies are being developed to meet these requirements using both 4G and 5G air interfaces. Technologies like data analytics and prediction methods to estimate end-user experience based on key network performance metrics to predict when problems may occur in operators’ networks, identify the root cause of these problems were showcased.

1000x capacity: The growth of data traffic, both due to increasing subscriber base and data usage per subscriber, implies that there is constant need for new spectrum.

Nokia has been working on a number of features to achieve a 1000x capacity improvement by using LTE technology. This 1000x capacity improvement is achieved by using 10 times more spectrum, 10 times more base stations and 10 times more spectral efficiency. Nokia also showcased how unlicensed spectrum can be used by LTE to increase spectrum causing only as much interference as Wi-Fi.

Other solutions displayed were Nokia’s small cell solutions that help with the densification of base stations, multi-cell coordination techniques and liquid applications (mobile edge computing) and how they can do more with the same amount of spectrum by improving spectral efficiency and cell-edge performance were also showcased.