TI and AirHop Announce Advanced SON software for Small Cells

Texas Instruments and AirHop Communications are collaborating to integrate AirHop's eSON advanced self-organizing network (SON) software on TI's KeyStone-based small cell System-on-Chips (SoCs). This will enable small cell base stations that will facilitate operators' ability to deploy heterogeneous networks.



The companies said HetNet requires SON technology specifically designed for small cell networks to actively optimize system capacity and manage inter-cell interference.



TI's scalable KeyStone architecture includes support for both TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) generation cores and multiple cache coherent quad ARM Cortex-A15 clusters, for a mixture of up to 32 DSP and RISC cores. In addition, TI's KeyStone architecture includes fully offloaded, flexible packet and security coprocessors and capacity expansion for SoC structural elements such as TeraNet, Multicore Navigator and Multicore Shared Memory Controller (MSMC).



AirHop's eSON software delivers multi-cell coordination and optimization that can be deployed in fully distributed, centralized or hybrid architectures and, for maximum flexibility, can be located anywhere in the core network cloud and on a variety of network edge devices. TI's KeyStone multicore SoC architecture enables more efficient measurements from the lower level PHY stack, required by the higher level SON algorithms, resulting in optimized SON solutions for customers.



AirHop's SON software support will be available for TI's KeyStone-based small cell solutions in the second half of 2012. http://www.ti.com/multicorehttp://www.airhopcomm.com