Philips takes aim at network interference
Royal Philips Electronics has completed a successful commercial network field trial of single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC) chips for next generation GSM/GPRS mobile phones.
The trial, conducted with US regional provider Cingular Wireless, used mobile handset prototypes from Philips.
SAIC technology enables handsets to remove interference from undesired signals while efficiently focussing on the signals from the most appropriate base station.
It provides network operators with shorter download times over GPRS data channels and offers more robust GSM communications, including Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech channels, which translate into higher spectral efficiency allowing operators to carry more calls per base station.
As a result, network capacity can be increased and service quality improved for mobile subscribers, according to Cingular Wireless strategic technology VP Dave Williams.
"The trial showed approximately a 20% increase in voice capacity and GPRS throughput, and we expect this to at least double (with likelihood of even more improvement) once we move our networks to fully synchronised," Williams said.
"We have been pushing for practical mobile station performance improvements for years, and while others have suggested interference cancellation impractical, requiring two antennas and double the electronics, Philips has stepped up and shown that a high performance low-cost solution is feasible today with a single antenna and a powerful DSP.”
Williams said that SAIC will provide equal benefit to all Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK)-based transmission schemes, as used for voice and GPRS.
Additionally, there are good indications that the gains will continue to improve with additional network synchronisation, Williams added.
To further the adoption and standardisation of this new technology, SAIC will be adopted as a work item in 3GPP, an international standards organisation developing 3G evolution for GSM and UMTS.
6-Nov-2002