New 5G Developments Brighten U.S. Next-gen Landscape

May 11, 2015

By Ernest Worthman —

Worthman

May 14, 2015 — The opinions of what and where the 5G landscape is today are all over the map. But there is a lot of agreement that the state of 5G in the United States lags much of the rest of the world. However, there are signs that it is starting to change.

A couple of bright spots have popped up. Why these are worth noting is because they are not your typical vendor coming up with a new 5G platform or some exotic frequency coding scheme that will quadruple the number of users while requiring half the bandwidth. Rather it is a couple of major industry players that have put out something for the benefit of the technology.

The first comes from National Instrument, which has just opened a new U.S. wireless innovation lab to help advance 5G technology. This lab will provide a hardware and software platform to build prototypes and conduct tests in field trials as they work toward developing 5G standards.
NI’s intent is to support ongoing collaborations with top academic and industry research groups participating in its RF/Communications Lead User program. Players include researchers at Intel, Lund University, Nokia Networks, NYU Wireless, Samsung, the University of Texas at Austin and Dresden University of Technology.

These are all players driving significant advances in the development of next-generation wireless systems and furthering research in 5G. Some of the things that the lab will further facilitate, include mmWave cellular systems, the 5G Massive MIMO test bed and the LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite. Good work NI!

HP = NFV

Another player with the same philosophy is HP. They have a new network functions virtualization (NFV) system. The NFV system is a pre-integrated platform designed to enable communications service providers to accelerate production NFV deployments.

Not that HP doesn’t have some self-interest, but it is the good kind. They have a healthy wheelhouse of NFV experience and that is something the industry needs. HP has been engaged in NFV trials and proof-of-concepts with carriers around the world, for more than a year and a half. Major players include Nokia Networks and Telefónica, of late.

Their system integrates the HP NFV Control Kit, which consists of HP Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade virtual infrastructure management (VIM) software and physical infrastructure management software; HP NFV Starter Kit, an all-in-one kit of compute nodes with carrier-grade performance; and the HP NFV Compute Kit, which includes server nodes that run virtual network functions (VNF) workloads.

Sarwar Raza, vice president of product management for HP’s NFV business, said that HP’s product “is a set of solutions that enables you to go from a trial stage to deployment very, very rapidly by leveraging the solution expertise that we bring to the table.”

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Ernest Worthman is the editor of Small Cell Magazine.