Kyocera Corporation (President: Tetsuo Kuba) announced today that it has successfully completed full interoperability testing (IOT) of its MIMO-supported regenerative repeaters and indoor pico base stations with Aricent’s® WiMAX Integrated Gateway (WING) software frameworks, rounding out a complete indoor mobile WiMAX solution for its customers worldwide.

Enhanced indoor coverage provided by WiMAX is the key factor to maintaining existing customers and developing new customers, as the majority of wireless data communications are performed indoors in locations such as offices, homes, hotels, stations and restaurants. In particular, the recent expansion in use of WiMAX-embedded PCs and 3G/WiMAX dual-mode mobile handsets has made indoor WiMAX coverage a significant issue.

Kyocera is now offering two types of regenerative repeaters: “Public Repeaters” for large- and medium-sized office buildings and “Home/SME Repeaters” for residential use and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Regenerative repeaters consist of a donor node and a service node; the donor node serves as a WiMAX CPE and the service node as a WiMAX femtocell base station. The signals received from the base station are converted to base-band signals and enhanced at the donor node. Moreover, the digitized signal is transferred to the service node and re-converted to a signal for communication with the mobile station.

This mechanism allows regenerative repeaters to assign different spectrum channels to the donor node and service node to suppress loop interference. Regenerative repeaters also support MIMO antenna technology. The concept behind Kyocera’s regenerative repeaters is “WiMAX Backhaul Femto,” which does not require a dedicated line for backhaul, and thus allows Mobile WiMAX operators to save on operational expenditures (OPEX) for indoor coverage enhancement. Furthermore, for higher data-traffic areas, Kyocera also offers an Indoor WiMAX pico base station called the “Super Picocell Base Station.”

“We are very pleased with the results of our collaboration with Kyocera, ensuring interoperability between our WiMAX Integrated Gateway (WING) and Kyocera’s indoor regenerative repeaters and pico base station,” said Rakesh Vij, Assistant Vice President at Aricent. “Aricent’s pre-packaged and pre-optimized WiMAX Access and Core Network frameworks truly offer equipment vendors an opportunity to accelerate time to market and more efficiently deploy the improved indoor mobile broadband coverage users now demand.”

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