News
LoRa Alliance adds global IoT
roaming in latest LoRaWAN specs
The LoRa Alliance (San Ramon, CA) –
the association of companies backing
the open LoRaWAN standard for Internet
of Things (IoT) low-power wide-area networks
(LPWANs) – has released its latest
technical specifications.
Announced at the organization’s ninth
All Members Meeting in Suzhou, China,
the latest specification releases include
roaming and separation of backend
nodes, which will enable IoT devices to
connect to and move between LPWANs
around the world. According to the
organization, this supports large-scale
deployments and enables new global
services such as cargo tracking – seen
by the Alliance as critical to driving
widespread adoption of the LoRaWAN
protocol as the de facto standard for IoT
connectivity. The following specifications
were officially announced at the event:
• LoRaWAN 1.1 with support for handover
roaming, and Class B, and security
enhancements;
• LoRaWAN Backend Interfaces 1.0 with
support for decomposing the network
into interoperable nodes, as required
for inter-vendor roaming;
• LoRaWAN 1.1 Regional Parameters
rev. A, which describes region-specific
radio parameters for LoRaWAN 1.1 end
devices.
The support for roaming, says the Alliance,
will allow for large-scale deployments
since vendors will know that their
LoRaWAN protocol-based products could
potentially operate worldwide. The new
backend specification provides the protocols
that interconnect servers with distinct
roles behind the scenes in the core network,
allowing an open choice of vendors
for each element of the value chain.
www.lora-alliance.org
Enea OSE to reduce
latency in 5G basestation
Enea® has been selected by an Asian
tier one telecom equipment manufacturer
(TEM), to deliver its 64-bit Enea OSE
multicore operating system for use in
time-critical functions in a line of 5G radio
base stations.
Enea OSE was chosen based on its
ability to combine high throughput with
low latency on multicore processors. In
the design, Enea OSE will provide the
runtime for L2 baseband processing on
a 24-core CPU. Thanks to the unique
capability of Enea OSE to linearly scale
performance over many cores, developers
benefit from high throughput while
keeping the freedom to design user
applications.
With the introduction of 5G networks,
access systems must be able to handle
considerably higher bandwidth, far
lower latencies and massive connection
density. Enea OSE provides the low
latency and high throughput needed, in
a platform that also provides a migration
path for future updates, and the flexibility
to support different CRAN splits.
www.enea.com
Plasma silicon antenna halves
mmWave 5G basestation costs
Plasma Antennas, the inventors of
plasma silicon technology, have unveiled
the mmWave Plasma Silicon Antenna
(PSiAN) – an antenna that offers huge improvements
in performance for 5G base
stations compared to the current generation
of technology.
Based on the company’s patented
Plasma Silicon technology, the antenna
reduces the cost of a 5G base station by
up to 50 percent by eliminating phase
shifters, reducing and consolidating amplification
and reducing computation.
The PSiAN has no moving parts and
is dynamically reconfigurable as it forms
and steers beams. The technology does
not need calibration and can handle practically
unlimited power, having already
been to tested up to 40-W. The Plasma
Silicon-based products are smaller,
lighter and use less power than equivalent
products using current technology.
The PSiAN also has an omni mode, when
it draws no power at all.
The company has shown the value of
the technology in a variety of scenarios,
including a 360-degree field of view beam
forming and steering 28-GHz 5-W PSiAN,
useful for pole mounted small cells,
indoor small cells, or on a vehicle and a
high power, long range, low loss small
cell base station antenna for standalone
and MIMO 5G, Fixed Wireless Access
(FWA), and Connected Vehicle applications.
These devices can also be stacked
to form and steer beams in two dimensions
(azimuth and elevation), or to form
multiple beams and MIMO applications.
“Time after time we hear that cost
and range are the biggest challenges
facing mmWave 5G projects,” said Paul
Phillipson CEO of Plasma Antennas.
“Our patented Plasma Silicon technology
answers both of these problems simultaneously,
delivering a huge leap forward in
performance and power consumption.”
www.plasmaantennas.com
Edge devices get 20x AI
performance boost
The combination of the CEVA-XM imaging
and vision platform and deep learning
technology from Brodmann17 brings
ultra-low power deep learning vision to
smartphones, drones, cars, surveillance
cameras and more. The CEVA, Inc., and
Broadmann17 partnership aims to accelerate
the deployment of deep learning
computer vision in mainstream applications
– bringing an order of magnitude
increase in performance and power efficiency
for deep learning in edge devices.
Through the collaboration with Brodmann17,
licensees of the CEVA-XM platforms
and their customers will be able to
use Brodmann17’s deep learning object
detection that achieves state of the art
accuracy on the CEVA-XM at a rate of
100 frames per second. Comparing to the
popular combination today of Faster-
RCNN algorithm over NVIDIA TX2 it is an
improvement of 20 times (2000 perecent)
in frames per second.
www.brodmann17.com
www.ceva-dsp.com
8 MW November - December 2017 www.mwee.com
