In one fell swoop we can cut base station energy consumption and relieve the airwave congestion that causes dropped calls.

Commonplace as cellular base stations are, you may not suspect either how much electricity they devour or the vast amount of traffic that’s pouring through them at peak hours.

TI’s KeyStone-enabled C-RAN addresses both the power consumption and the potentially hobbling dataflow.

Short for cloud radio-access network, C-RAN is a network design that centralizes cellular base station computing resources with an eye toward improving wireless network quality and reducing base station costs. TI’s KeyStone base station systems-on-a-chip, or SoCs, help do that and then some.

• These SoCs are muscular, dedicated devices that support all the complex, processing-intensive functions that C-RAN requires. Plus these chips are orders of magnitude more power-efficient than the microprocessors that might otherwise be used.
• Base stations in a typical city operate near full capacity during the business day, when suburban traffic is relatively light. The situation reverses when commuters return home each evening. C-RAN both consolidates transmission equipment control and spreads out the load, improving the balance of resource consumption.
• By spreading out the traffic load, this approach to managing wireless traffic will in turn streamline people’s wireless access to computing resources and information storage.
• No flash in the pan, TI’s KeyStone multicore architecture is a result of years of field experience in wireless base station technology that has continually focused on the combination of high performance and low power.

TI’s KeyStone architecture provides the required processing power and efficient wireless baseband acceleration needed to achieve both a green footprint and operational benefits of C-RAN, and is working  closely with its customers to enable large-scale cloud base stations.