How Small Cell Ecosystems Can Take 'the heat out of' Hot Spots

By Zia Askari

Today's unprecedented data surge demands that small cells are now being asked to more than double their performance cycles in order to meet continuous surge in customer demands.

This customer demand of data in-take is coming not only from consumption of data inside malls, coffee shops or Airports and Railway stations but also from large number of people trying to connect from tourist spots, uploading their pictures live from such locations has suddenly become important today.

I personally experienced this need while visiting most of the forts and palaces in Jaipur. It was 26^th of January – India’s republic day and there were a lot of data-hungry people trying to connect through their networks from such spots. However, lack of connectivity became the big challenge.

Deployments of small cells can dramatically change this scenario and enable easy data flow without clogging of telecom networks.

Similarly, when we are watching a Cricket match in a stadium, an IPL match or a Tennis game - even macro cells struggle to cope with the load of data trying its way inside the networks. Many small cells serving hot spots and hot zones are now seeing significant loading of up to 150 simultaneous users per cell, and this trend will only continue.

In such a scenario, solutions such as the Nokia Flexi Zone small cell solution can become useful in terms of handling 600 users at a time. “Achieving this figure took some ‘top down thinking’. Instead of using the Femto or small cell chipsets on the market, we took our Macro cell chipsets and shrank them into one. The result was a small cell that is not only the smallest in the industry, but packs more punch with the same capacity and features as our macro cells,” explains, Stephane Daeuble, portfolio marketing manager at Nokia Networks in her blog on small cells.

600 users on 1 small cell? Yes!

“This means our Flexi Zone small cells can run the same software as our macro cells, so we can provide the full capabilities of our LTE Smart Scheduler. Competitors, with their less capable chipsets, can run only a limited and less feature-rich scheduler.” Stephane adds on.

According to her blog post, Flexi Zone can deliver significantly higher capacity for small cells, even in noisy environments. In fact, under light loads, Flexi Zone can offer 10-30% better performance than its small cell rivals because it employs the same advanced scheduler as its bigger brothers. “The scheduler has proven itself on many occasions to deliver a high performance in the noisy environments typical of most small cell deployments, which operate in the same channel as the macros,” Stephane explains.

Flexi Zone also has sufficient processing power to offer a number of advanced interference mitigation techniques that go beyond LTE 3GPP standards. Nokia launched some of these techniques during 2014 and will be releasing more to further boost real-life performance.

As small cells move towards maximizing data capacity and become less about coverage, operators can be assured that Flexi Zone – with its LTE smart scheduler, advanced HetNet features and spare baseband processing capacity – will be there to take the heat out of hot zones.