MWC: Nokia Siemens, TI countering Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio with 'Liquid Radio'

Alcatel-Lucent (NASDAQ:ALU) is drawing a lot of attention at Mobile World Congress with its new lightRadio architecture, which would turn today’s large-celled macro network into a massively distributed network of small transmitters and move its higher order functions out of the cell site and into the cloud. But Alcatel-Lucent isn’t the only vendor developing a fundamentally different approach to the network.

Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Samsung have either released or plan to soon release an integrated antenna and radio, one of the key elements of Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio. But Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) has gone even further, developing a distributed antenna and virtualized baseband architecture it calls Liquid Radio, incorporating and improving upon on all of the elements of lightRadio, said Tommi Uitto, head of global radio access for NSN.

“It’s a good vision,” Uitto said of lightRadio. “It’s a vision in line with we have already developed. Technically [lightRadio] is sound. We just want to go beyond it.

NSN expects to beat Alcatel-Lucent to market with its remote radio head, which combines the radio, amplifier and antenna into a single modular unit. The integrated antenna, which will be available in June, is modular and can be deployed in arrays to create cells of any size just like lightRadio’s cube, Uitto said.

But Uitto added that NSN’s biggest innovations in evolving the network are still in the development phases. While NSN may be later to bring its concept to market, Uitto believes it will be a far more flexible and advanced architecture than lightRadio. Liquid Radio will use a baseband system-on-a-chip (SoC) developed by NSN’s silicon partner Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN). But while lightRadio seeks to remove all of the baseband functions from the cell site, NSN’s Liquid Radio design would keep a baseline processing capacity at the site integrated directly into the radio unit, but would virtualize additional baseband capacity in the cloud, Uitto said.

NSN’s idea is to give each cell site the resources it needs to function independently, but maintain a virtual SWAT team of baseband capacity that can be deployed to any cell site in the network as needed. Essentially baseband resources would follow demand throughout the network, supplying support to cells as they become filled with subscribers and moving on to the next overtaxed cell as those subscribers depart.

Uitto, however, said he was not prepared to say when Liquid Radio would be ready for commercial release. Meanwhile Alcatel-Lucent has said lightRadio will start trials this year China Mobile (NYSE:CHL) this year.

While Freescale and ALU have made much about their collaboration to develop a base station architecture on a single integrated circuit, TI Communications Infrastructure general manager Brian Glinsman, said the technology is by no means unique. While most of TI’s baseband work has focused on the digital signal processor, it has been developing SoC architectures for some time, Glinsman said. At Mobile World Congress this week TI announced its own SoC multi-standard base station architecture—one that TI said can deliver two times the capacity of other solutions.

Glinsman said it has also developed a SoC solution that will be able support all of the key functions Freescale and ALU have touted in lightRadio and will announce the platform later this year.