SAN FRANCISCO—French wireless communications chip vendor Sequans Communications SA said Tuesday (May 8) it added a new interference mitigation algorithm to its LTE chip platforms that the company says can increase throughput by more than three-fold and can increase network capacity by up to two fold.
Sequans (Paris) said its Active Interference Rejection (AIR) technology was co-developed with technology partner ArrayComm Inc, a Silicon Valley firm specializing in multi-antenna signal processing. AIR works by forming a receive beam toward the useful signal, and spatial nulls in the direction of interfering signals, Sequans said.
"LTE spectrum is limited and interference is becoming an issue for operators as network traffic increases," said Bertrand Debray, Sequans' chief technology officer, in a statement.
Debray said that while network-based interference mitigation techniques are specified in future releases of the LTE standard, these techniques are not available currently. "We designed Sequans AIR in response to this, and have developed a powerful interference solution that can be implemented on today’s LTE networks for significant benefits to end users and network operators," Debray said.
Sequans said AIR is designed to work in any LTE network (TDD or FDD), regardless of eNode B, carrier frequency or channel bandwidth. AIR works today on LTE Release 8 and 9 networks and will work on future Release 10 and 11 networks, the company said. The technology is also designed into the company's latest LTE platforms, the company said.
Debray said AIR has been tested and proven at both the system and link levels. "It has been tested in numerous interference scenarios, using the various transmission modes of LTE, and even in the most challenging situations where there are numerous interfering signals to be rejected by only two UE antennas, the Sequans AIR receiver shows a significant gain, rejecting in some cases twice as much interference as the default receiver," Debray said.
A white paper detailing the performance and benefits of AIR is available on Sequans' website.
This article was originally posted by EE Times.
