Talk about getting a bigger bang for your buck! Santa Clara, CA-based Cohere Technologies is bringing to market a software enhancement that allows mobile network operators to effectively double the number of connected devices or user equipment (UE) on their networks and without adding new spectrum or more cell sites.
Inside Towers caught up with industry veteran Ronny Haraldsvik, Cohere’s SVP-Business Development and CMO, at Connect(X). “In our field testing, we have found that using real traffic data we can double spectral efficiencies in most bands, both FDD and TDD, over 70+ percent of the time,” he says.
Here’s the gist of how it works. Cohere’s software delivers a significant spectrum multiplier effect for mobile networks by applying spatial multiplexing. This feature is independent of standard time and frequency techniques used to allocate channels or connections to UEs within a base station coverage area.
The secret sauce is Cohere’s novel Delay Doppler channel engine that incorporates channel detection, estimation, and prediction technology for beamforming. Cohere’s technology can live with latency between 50-100 milliseconds and can be deployed in the cloud. This technique enables the spatial replication of radios, giving operators a more flexible and efficient alternative to the two-dimensional channel model of time and frequency. (Think Doppler radar that locates and tracks aircraft, with angle of arrival and other parameters.)
This means that Cohere’s solution, dubbed the Universal Spectrum Multiplier, can apply to any generation network, in all available spectrum. USM software enables multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) and massive MIMO for both frequency division duplex and time division duplex networks in any band. The software works under varying mobility conditions, with any radio and any handset, while operating in the cloud.
The resulting channel representation is inherently slow changing, given its geometric nature but enables channel predictability into the future, independent of frequency and waveform. Now it’s possible to enable beamforming using cloud-based tools with Cohere’s technology accommodating up to 100 ms of latency to set up the real-time beam compared to only 10 ms in TDD. This delay allows base station radios to cover more UEs in close proximity or reach more UEs over an expanded coverage area.
Within a telco cloud, the Cohere channel estimation and scheduler can run as an xApp, a software tool used by the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), to manage Open RAN network functions in near real time. The RIC controls and optimizes RAN functions and resources. Working with a multi-cloud services provider such as VMware, Cohere’s xApp can be hosted in the near real time RIC of any telco cloud environment.
Since the Delay Doppler channel model is waveform independent, 5G capacity can be improved in FDD or TDD spectrum. Similarly, the global installed base of 4G LTE base stations that mainly use sub-1 GHz FDD spectrum is also a candidate for USM software upgrades to help relieve network congestion problems.
Cohere claims the Delay Doppler engine is necessary to deliver true spatial multiplexing on global Massive MU-MIMO investments. Its ability to represent the channel across all the UEs attached to the base station enables simultaneous orthogonal beams to be formed to multiple UEs in the same spectrum, thus multiplying spectral capacity. This ability to enable beamforming in an alternative way is attracting interest from MNOs.
A proof of concept was run with Deutsche Telekom in 2020, and Vodafone in 2021, and more field trials are underway in 2022. Haraldsvik points out, “We have trials on three continents, some very large and some small, although I cannot be specific. Commercial roll outs expected next year.”
Haraldsvik wouldn’t comment on pricing but did point out that the company can work directly with existing RAN vendors (“the big guys”). As an xApp on top of any carrier’s RIC, the MNO can purchase it either directly from Cohere or from RIC vendors such as VMware, Juniper, and others, depending on the agreements.
By John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor
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