NEC to develop LTE-Advanced high-capacity base station equipment for DOCOMO

NTT DOCOMO INC. has selected NEC Corp. to develop ‘high-capacity base station equipment’ that supports DOCOMO's proposed LTE-Advanced communications system.

NEC is developing equipment that is operable with DOCOMO's sophisticated new Centralized Radio Access Network (CRAN) architecture. This is expected to result in higher speed transmissions and efficient use of radio resources through the use of carrier aggregation technology, which will enable coverage areas to be adjusted flexibly and advanced coordination to take place between a variety of cells.

This is accomplished in a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) environment where macro cells that cover wide areas and small cells that cover local areas with high population density and heavy traffic coexist.

NEC's newly developed base station equipment establishes a GPS or an IEEE1588 standard (a protocol for synchronizing base station clocks that are scattered in a network) synchronization scheme, which reduces the interference between base stations. This will enable flexible expansion of networks in the future. Furthermore, this base station equipment can support 3G/LTE services, as well as LTE-Advanced services.