Date: 03/10/2012

Ubee-AirWalk selects Wind River’s VxWorks for its enterprise femtocell on Sprint network

Wind River has announced that Ubee-AirWalk is using VxWorks in its latest enterprise-grade CDMA femtocell. Branded as the Sprint AIRAVE Pro Connect, it is currently a part of Sprint’s in-building solutions product portfolio.

Ubee-AirWalk offers small cell technology, with a portfolio including femtocells, picocells and metrocells. Small cells are compact wireless base stations that expand and enhance network service in high-usage areas. Picocells and metrocells are typically deployed in public areas to fill in coverage gaps unreachable by the existing macro infrastructure. Residential and enterprise femtocells are well-suited as in-building solutions to bring stronger cellular coverage into the home or office.

The AIRAVE Pro Connect enterprise femtocells get better cellular reception and enhance coverage and capacity at enterprises, campuses, government buildings and other public venues using a broadband connection. The AIRAVE Pro Connect permits Sprint to expand voice and data service to new venues and enhance coverage with existing customers with a cost-effective, in-building solution. To meet the challenges of increasing mobile traffic and high expectations for user experience and uninterrupted connectivity, Ubee-AirWalk required to meet hard real-time processing requirements to develop a product that could consistently offload heavy voice and data usage from the macro cellular network to a corporate network. VxWorks is the market leading and de facto real-time operating system (RTOS) for the embedded industry, and has real-time attributes, security capabilities and a rich network stack that were key factors in Ubee-AirWalk’s selection of VxWorks.

“Enterprise femtocells assist our customers in reducing costs, speeding deployments and offloading voice and data usage from the macro network. In order to develop cost-effective and reliable small cells, it was necessary to find technologies that met our requirements such as capabilities for low latency, high configurability for security and smooth integration with our silicon preferences,” said Chris Osborn, chief technology officer at Ubee-AirWalk. “VxWorks was a clear choice for our enterprise femtocell as it is the most widely used and proven RTOS throughout the industry. We’ve long worked with Wind River and keep returning as they continually deliver on our technology needs as well as provide outstanding support at each step.”

“The ever increasing volume of data traffic on wireless networks and resulting network congestion put operators under pressure to further expand coverage and maintain subscriber service quality levels,” said Mike Langlois, general manager for networking at Wind River. “By relying on Wind River, Ubee-AirWalk is able to develop networking products that tackle coverage and system capacity issues that are top of mind with operators.”

Source: Wind River