As a follow up to my article on Wireless Expansion in Developing Areas I wrote not long ago for Wireless Design and Development magazine, I asked myself if I could go one step further and explain how we made it possible to provide backhaul. More specifically, how our client can easily leverage the features we added to the latest DSP to provide cellular and backhaul concurrently using a single multi-core device. All of this while keeping everything at low cost, low power and not affecting the ease of installation.

In my previous article, we were using a System on Chip (SoC) DSP that would be the core processor of a compact BTS setup. The very same SoC can be used to provide the backhaul simultaneously to the cellular portion. With its multiple independent RF interfaces, our clients can connect both cellular and backhaul antenna directly on one device. The backhaul is also flexible, offering the option to use OFDM or cellular UE standard with high performance radio. Since we wanted that our clients be able to customize and adapt the backhaul modem to their specific needs (LOS, NLOS), we designed our DSP to be C programmable. That’s a lot …