Adaptive Wireless™
In cellular wireless, as a terminal moves across the cell, the wireless signal experiences substantial interference: noise from other basestations and terminals, multipath effects caused by the signal reflecting off buildings, reduction in signal strength over a long distances or through indoor use. These different channel conditions place a range of demands on the signal processing that decodes and receives the signal inside the mobile device.
With conventional hard-wired solutions it would be necessary to instantiate all required algorithms as separate areas of silicon. This approach results in a high-cost and high power consumption solution, as well as having all the problems associated with the inherent inflexibility. In addition, verification of these separate hardware operating modes is arduous and problematic. This leads us to a solution that cannot possibly provide optimum performance under all circumstances as inevitable compromises are made with algorithm parameters.
In contrast, by implementing these complex algorithms in software, Icera is not constrained to always use the same receiver architecture. A menu of receiver algorithms, including rake, advanced receivers and receive diversity, can be made available to the modem, without incurring increased cost or increased silicon verification time. The Adaptive Wireless™ solution, at any given instant in time, selects the optimum mixture of algorithms that will maximise system performance. This judgement is based upon a large number of criteria and optimisation constraints. Channel conditions are continuously monitored, together with other performance metrics, to determine the best receiver configuration to deliver the highest possible performance.
This dynamic receiver architecture delivers dramatic performance throughput gains and receiver sensitivity advantages. Files download in under half the time of other HSDPA solutions. Web browsing is noticeably faster. Network carriers achieve this dramatic user experience advantage with more than a doubling in sector capacity and a consequent halving in per-megabyte delivery cost.
