Using Cavium’s OCTEON Fusion small cell “base station on a chip” hardware and software platform, carriers such as LG U+, are able to rapidly expand their existing macro cell based networks with a large number of small base stations. With this, the coverage may be expanded rapidly over a large geographical area providing service to the large base of rural customers, as well in dense areas such as metro and high-rise enterprises. More importantly, off-loading of data to these small cells provides increased bandwidth while alleviating the capacity crunch faced by the operators. In order for carriers to effectively deploy and manage such a large and distributed radio access, base stations need to be interoperable with the existing macro and core networks, compact, inexpensive, easily manageable, energy efficient and reliable with the ability to offer differentiating capabilities such as concurrent support of WLAN, QoS, interference mitigation and Self-Optimizing Networks (SON).

The OCTEON Fusion processors combine OCTEON’s proven and scalable L2-L7 multi-core technology, already adopted in multiple tier-1 macro wireless equipment, along with purpose-built, highly programmable baseband DSP cores and extensive 3G/4G hardware accelerators along with digital front end functionality into a single chip. The OCTEON Fusion processor combines 4x 64 bit cnMIPS cores operating at up to 1.5GHz with highly optimized baseband.

DSP’s and several carefully designed hardware accelerator blocks that interact through a very high performance interconnect which enable deterministic and low-latency data processing between protocol layers. The OCTEON Fusion family consists of two software compatible product lines: CNF71XX and CNF72XX, delivering industry leading performance and low power to enable small cell base stations supporting from 32 to 300+ users on both LTE and 3G platforms.

“Next generation wireless infrastructures are extremely complex to design, deploy and deliver revenue generating services for consumers. Small cell technology has to coexist with this sensitive and critical infrastructure. After a series of careful evaluation of several platforms, we have selected Cavium’s OCTEON Fusion processor platform to power our enterprise small cell deployment,” stated Choi Taek Jin, Vice President of LG U+. “We look forward to aggressively expanding both our LTE subscriber base and our high bandwidth data services with the roll out of cost-effective, feature-rich small cell solutions based on OCTEON Fusion platform.”

Cavium Networks Inc.