CTIA: Eden Rock takes a new approach to SON

SAN FRANCISCO -- When vendors talk about self-organizing networks, they typically mean the plug-n-play aspects of self-optimizing network (SON): self-configuring, self-provisioning base stations that can be plopped down anywhere in the network. New SON technology vendor Eden Rock Communications, however, is looking at a different aspect of SON, one it feels hasn’t gotten enough attention. Rather than focus on how the base station aligns itself upon installation, Eden Rock is concerned with how the base station cooperates with its neighbors after it’s situated.

Eden Rock is launching its first SON platform, Eden-Net, at CTIA Enterprise & Applications this week. The solution, composed of base station and radio network controller agent software, allows individual base stations to coordinate their transmit power on a user-by-user basis, which maximizes the resources available to the network overall and eliminates a good deal of the points of interference between cells. Eden Rock CEO Chaz Immendorf said that using Eden-Net could increase overall network capacity as much as 40% and boost performance at the cell edge by as much as 200%.

Immendorf said Eden-Net is designed to maximize the potential of a multi-node wireless network as overall capacity degrades with the addition of each new node. The platform uses real-time measurement, detection, and reporting techniques to dynamically coordinate transmit power and scheduling between adjacent base stations, selecting the best path for optimal throughput to each user, while mitigating the interference between sites. Eden-Net also incorporates coordinated beamforming techniques that would allow multiple nodes to transmit to the same user. Diagnostic capabilities in the software allows the network to self-detect external sources of interference that might impact the network and identify common congestion points in the network that could trigger automatic resizing of cells in the network to meet the demand. “We’re trying to make the whole greater than the sum,” Immendorf said.

The software isn’t designed to be a stand-alone solution, but rather, to be incorporated into a vendor’s eNode B architecture. Immendorf said several Tier 1 vendors have begun evaluating Eden Rock’s technology, including Motorola, and the company hopes to announce its first major customer this year.

As carriers start building their 3G and 4G networks for capacity to meet the extraordinary demands for mobile data, capacity optimization solutions such as Eden Rock’s will be critical, Immendorf said. Operators will have to deploy more and more small-cell topologies, which will add plenty of capacity to the network but also create far more cell edges to deal with. “The more base stations you deploy in a given geography, the more points of interference you create,” Immendorf said. “Eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns.”