Cambridge Communication Systems has announced the successful trial of its self-organising small cell microwave backhaul system with China Telecom.
The trial network consisted of a single CCS node installed on the eighth floor of China Telecom’s head office, plus a wider mesh network comprising additional nodes at street level and nearby buildings.
Throughput and latency tests held at each location revealed speeds of 480MBps per node and under 150s latency per hop.
The nodes automatically scanned the surrounding area and connected to others nearby. The wired backhaul node acted as a partition manager, which made decisions about traffic routing in order to provide the most efficient capacity.
If a node had multiple possible links between neighbours, “self-healing” takes place to recover and switch between routes should link conditions change.
The backhaul network ran at 28GHz with high capacity and low latency for the backhaul of mobile base stations and small cells.
CCS said the trial demonstrated self-organising multipoint-to-multipoint nodes in a dense city environment.
The UK-based vendor claimed to be able to install individual nodes in just 15 minutes, including site preparation, with minimal training. It added that the nodes were able to be installed without planning for radio frequency or aligning antennas.
CCS CEO and co-founder Steve Greaves commented: “It is not just the benchmark results that impress, but also the ease with which we were able to demonstrate the solution. Our unique self-organising system is an excellent fit for the Chinese market, where small cell deployments are leading the world.”
In February, the vendor undertook a similar trial with China Mobile.
[Read more: China Mobile and CSS deploy first self-organising small cell microwave backhaul system]