LTE uplink performance boosted using new design

UK-based Cambridge Consultants is claiming its latest innovation is a breakthrough in terms of significantly improving LTE uplink performance without any changes needed to handsets.

The company claims its Dual-domain Uplink Equaliser for LTE (DUEL) receiver technology uses 'unique and highly complex' algorithms to take advantage of properties of the LTE uplink signal to reconstruct what was transmitted with higher fidelity than a conventional text-book receiver. As a result, says the firm, it works well even when the signals received by each base station antenna are highly correlated.

Monty Barlow, group leader for DSP at Cambridge Consultants, explained: "There were two key challenges that we faced in designing a better receiver. Firstly, we needed to understand the information within the uplink signal that could be used to reconstruct what we received more accurately, which in itself was a mammoth mathematical challenge. Secondly, we needed to find a way to reduce the processing complexity so that it could be implemented within sensible resources. The outcome is that DUEL can be deployed on any base-station baseband platform, including DSP, FPGA and even ASIC."

Tim Fowler, commercial director in Cambridge Consultants' wireless division, added: "Downlink speeds have traditionally received more focus as consumers look to download multimedia content onto mobile devices. However, with the increase in popularity of mobile micro-blogging, social networking and video-sharing, uplink performance will become more and more important.  We believe that this development fills a critical gap in the technology and will benefit both operators and end users."

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