Nokia unveils 5G focused chipset

On Monday 29 January 2018, Nokia unveiled its new ReefShark chipsets. The chipsets leverage in-house silicon expertise to reduce the size, cost and power consumption of operators’ networks and meet the massive compute and radio requirements of 5G, according to the company.

The chipsets also incorporates Nokia Bell Labs artificial intelligence (AI) innovations as well as Nokia’s capabilities in antenna development for mobile devices and base stations. According to Nokia, its ReefShark chipsets for radio frequency (RF) units such as the radio used in antennas significantly improve their performance, this results in halving the size of massive MIMO antennas. ReefShark chipsets thus also reduce power consumption in baseband units by 64%, compared to such units in use today.

The ReefShark chipsets for compute capacity are delivered as plug-in units for the commercially available Nokia AirScale baseband module. AirScale is software upgradeable to full 5G functionality, and these plug-in units triple throughput from Nokia’s  28 Gbps today, to up to 84 Gbps per module. Additionally, AirScale baseband module chaining supports base station throughputs of up to 6 terabits per second, which will allow operators to meet the huge growing densification demands and support the massive enhanced mobile broadband needs of people and devices in megacities, according to Nokia.

AI in 5G networks enables real-time radio monitoring and optimisation and the ability to apply techniques such as network slicing to meet the service level demands of new business cases. Nokia also revealed that it is developing technology with common interfaces and toolkits allowing service providers to implement machine learning applications in their networks.

Nokia is working with 30 operators using ReefShark and will ramp up field deployments during the third quarter of 2018.

Neil McRae, BT Chief Architect, speaking about the chipsets said “By incorporating ReefShark into our network we will leverage the huge network performance improvements that will allow us to unleash the full potential of 5G.”

"With ReefShark, Nokia has created a clear competitive advantage. Its combination of power, intelligence and efficiency make it ideally suited to be at the heart of fast arriving 5G networks,” said Henri Tervonen, CTO of Nokia Mobile Networks and head of R&D Foundation

By Dean Workman
Follow Dean Workman on Twitter
Follow ITNewsAfrica.com on Twitter