Aricent’s Long Term Evolution Practice

  

Overview

LTE is the next evolution for most 3G and 3.5G technologies. It is essential for device manufacturers and infrastructure vendors to be ready with differentiated and cost competitive LTE products so they can gain market share and compete effectively in the wireless ecosystem of the future.

Aricent’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) practice offers equipment manufacturers comprehensive end-to-end solutions including pre-packaged software and frameworks along with a comprehensive set of product lifecycle services to develop feature-rich and differentiated products while gaining significant time-to-market advantage at lower R&D costs.

Select Customer Engagements

• Co-creating the LTE eNodeB for a large Tier-1 Japanese OEM
• Co-creating an LTE eNodeB reference solution for a large Tier-1 Chipset OEM
• IP Backhaul Product Development for a leading US-based OEM

Pre-packaged Software and Frameworks

• LTE User Equipment (UE) Software Suite – Aricent’s LTE UE Software Suite is a complete software package for device and semi-conductor vendors including fully optimized Layer 1, Layer 2 protocol software with support for high uplink and downlink data rates.

	Aricent’s products have been optimized on several industry leading platforms

• eNodeB Protocol Stacks and Framework – Aricent’s solutions for radio access equipment (eNodeB) range from pluggable stack software to pre-integrated and optimized product frameworks that have been benchmarked on multiple industry leading hardware platforms.
  
• EPC Protocol Stacks and Frameworks – Aricent offers a comprehensive suite of products and services for the Evolved Packet Core(EPC). We offer pre-packaged solutions for both the eSAE gateways (the SGW and the PGW), as well as the MME.
• IP Backhaul – Aricent offers a turnkey solution to build complete networking equipment systems for IP-based Mobile Backhaul solutions, including IP RAN Aggregation Devices, Data Offload Switches and Gateways, Metro Ethernet Switches and Carrier Ethernet Switch Routers.

Product Lifecycle Services

• Product Strategy and Design – With technology leadership and proficiency on LTE protocols and software frameworks, Aricent’s services in the areas of product strategy and architecture, system design, and hardware engineering help vendors ensure a smooth transition of products from proof-of-concepts to carrier grade solutions. Additionally, our UI Innovation services can help device manufacturers develop elegant and effective user interfaces for their LTE devices.
• Product Development – Aricent’s highly skilled consultants have completed numerous projects in LTE, from developing system requirements, to individual features, and complete products. Our teams have executed multiple LTE development programs for both OEMs as well as platform vendors.
• Testing and Certification – Aricent’s competence in testing domains such as product validation, interoperability, managed testing and certification has been defined by our rich history of customer engagements in the wireless space involving 2G, 2.5, 3G and now 4G technologies.

Key Benefits

Development Jumpstart – Much of the challenge with LTE lies in timing development investments to stay ahead of competitors, and being ready when the market sees volume purchases by carriers. Aricent’s LTE pre-packaged software and frameworks provide a development jumpstart to OEMs. Combined with complementary lifecycle management services, these enable real-time adjustments of development schedules and investments to ensure competitive readiness and mitigate market-timing risk.

Balance R&D resources between LTE and Existing products –  Despite the imperative to invest in LTE today, vendors need to simultaneously continue investing in their current products that are considered to be “cash cows”. Aricent delivers continuous engineering services – including complete product ownership – for the world’s largest telecommunications manufacturers, helping them free up internal resources to focus investment on LTE development.

Seamless Interoperability – While interoperability between network elements is critical for successful LTE deployments, the availability of equipment to perform end-to-end testing remains limited. Aricent’s in-house network simulator tools help vendors overcome equipment availability-related testing challenges. Additionally, Aricent’s comprehensive 3G lab infrastructure and a broad array of testing and certification services assure equipment manufacturers of seamless interoperability in real world deployments.

Platform Evolution and New Platform Development – The radical change in LTE’s architecture towards a flatter network and packet-only paradigm introduces challenges associated with both migrating current platforms and building new ones. Aricent’s proven expertise in helping customers develop new products and upgrading existing products, coupled with its deep domain expertise on LTE as well as legacy technologies and products, helps vendors deliver high quality products in a cost-effective manner.

Voice over LTE Support – As LTE does not natively support circuit voice or SMS, equipment vendors need to be prepared to support these critical services using either IMS, circuit-fallback, or circuit-switch over packet options such as VOLGA. Aricent’s extensive technology and domain experience can help vendors formulate a flexible LTE Voice strategy to accommodate all alternatives. Additionally, Aricent’s IMS, VoIP and VCC products help vendors deploy any chosen approach efficiently and cost-effectively.