Sooktha, an advanced wireless access solutions company, today announced that it has demonstrated a solution for radio access network centralization and virtualization using its LTE Advanced Smart Base Station (SBS) solution on the Freescale vAccess platform. The vAccess system powered by the Sooktha LTE Advanced SBS software was demonstrated by Freescale at the Mobile World Congress 2015 at Barcelona, Spain earlier this year.

Centralization and virtualization have the potential to significantly change the way networks are deployed. Today’s wireless base station nodes are very proprietary hardware and software platforms. With 5G convergence across wireless, wireline and IoT access methods, a modular, portable and standardized approach to implementing access network software is important. This is a critical requirement towards leveraging the full power of SDN and NFV in the access network.

The Sooktha SBS is a full base station implementation that can be easily spilt at different points to support different centralization and virtualization approaches. The support for a mix of FDD and TDD carriers, carrier aggregation, centralization, virtualization, VoLTE, and different traffic types – make it a powerful solution.

The Freescale vAccess is a combined Hardware / Software platform, which showcases a functional virtualized network system.

The vAccess platform effectively demonstrates:

• How to design and build modular, flexibly deployable software with standardized interfaces and deployment models
• Interaction between off-the-shelf L1 (Physical Layer/Baseband) and higher layer components from different vendors
• How to implement virtualization with minimal overheads

“We have been able to quickly deploy our SBS LTE eNodeB on the Freescale vAccess platform, communicating with remote radio nodes using standard network interfaces, and with SDN based orchestration,” says Balaji Rangaswamy, CEO at Sooktha. “This demonstrates the full power of the modularity and flexibility of our SBS solution that allow it to significantly accelerate the development of software-defined and virtualized access solutions.”

Wim Rouwet, Senior Systems Architect for Freescale, says: “This type of technology is really a starting point for what 5G network deployments will look like, where you have to provide a scalable solution across a variety of nodes, ranging from low-end to high-end, virtualized or not.”

The collaboration between the two companies is expected to evolve to productize components from this platform, as well as to evolve the hardware and software in the areas of functionality, performance and scalability.