Small cells have been extensively deployed around the world in all types of large buildings, from offices, hotels and apartment blocks to shopping centres, railway stations and airports. These systems are often expensive to deploy, needing to be designed and configured by experienced telecom engineers and built from proprietary units.

5G/4G systems built on Picocom products will change all this, with open interfaces allowing the different parts of the system to be purchased from the most appropriate vendors. For example, a small cell DU may be located in a central server room and consist of a standard server with Picocom-based baseband offload cards. Two or four antenna RUs that support the desired frequency bands can be located on each floor of the building and connected back to the DU using standard Ethernet cabling and switches, instead of proprietary systems.

Picocom design products focussed on RAN for small cell deployments that use the standard interfaces. The Extended Picocell Base Station Solution is designed to address weak signals or coverage hole that occur with macro base stations in indoor deep-coverage and complex wireless environments. Its advantages include compact size, lightweight design, and flexible installation, making it ideal for providing reliable wireless coverage in various indoor settings and complex environments where public network signals struggle to penetrate, such as large shopping malls, office buildings, hospitals, subway stations, sports arenas, and transportation hubs.

The solution comprises the following key components:Core network, 4G/5G dual-mode extended picocell base station, EU server and pRRU (micro remote radio unit) equipment.The extended picocell base station features a 4G+5G dual-mode baseband acceleration card based on the PC802 chip. This standard PCIe card (3/4-length full-height form factor) integrates three PC802 chips and one FPGA, with deeply optimized 4G and 5G PHY layer software. It plugs into servers running L2/L3 protocol stacks.For RF processing, the pRRU equipment utilizes the PC805 chip to deliver high-performance, low-power digital front-end (DFE) processing.

The solution supports flexible cell configuration combinations, with typical configurations including:

• Extended Pico: NR TDD 4×4T4R 100MHz + LTE TDD/FDD 3×2T2R 20MHz
• NR Baseband Pool: TDD 6×4T4R 100MHz
• LTE Private Network: LTE TDD/FDD 9×2T2R 20MHz