Texas Instruments (TXN) says it is scaling its multicore Keystone architecture for cloud radio access network base stations. The idea of replacing traditional cell site base stations with remote clusters of dense virtual base stations has been gaining popularity as operators and infrastructure companies look for ways to cut costs by reducing the amount of equipment in the field. Texas Instruments says KeyStone is the first multicore infrastructure architecture offering a comprehensive and scalable platform to base station developers.
Mobile operators know their customers’ voracious appetite for bandwidth will eat into profits if the demand for more bandwidth continues to be met with traditional networks. Small cells like femto and picocells, distributed antenna systems, active antenna arrays, remote radio heads and C-RAN base stations are all solutions that operators and infrastructure companies are investigating. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Alcatel-Lucent, Freescale and Hewlett-Packard introduced their lightRadio cube, generating even more interest in C-RAN base stations.
Texas Instruments’ expansion of its Keystone architecture will give network operators “a unified architecture that scales from small cells to massive C-RAN processing pools,” according to Ken Rehbehn, mobile infrastructure analyst at The Yankee Group.
