InterDigital has announced that the company will present at the LTE World Summit 2010 to be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands on May 18-20, 2010. Dr. Ariela Zeira, InterDigital's Vice-President of Advanced Air Interfaces, will provide an overview of the company's cellular technology roadmap and elaborate on advancements in "Fuzzy Cell" technology that address inconsistent and non-uniform performance across the cell. The Fuzzy Cell technology is part of InterDigital's comprehensive suite of "Next Generation Cellular" (NGC) innovations that combine advanced network topologies and spectrally-efficient air interface solutions for LTE-Advanced and beyond. LTE (Long Term Evolution) technologies are under development globally to support the next generation of cellular air interface technology.

Building on the company's legacy of inventing fundamental technologies used in 2G, 3G, and LTE cellular systems, InterDigital is now developing a new comprehensive set of advanced solutions that will drive future wireless systems, including LTE-Advanced. Using a holistic approach to solving network congestion, InterDigital is focused on three comprehensive areas of bandwidth innovations: spectrum optimization; cross-network connectivity and mobility; and intelligent data delivery techniques, using the descriptive phrase "bigger pipes, more pipes, and better pipes."

"The wireless industry is facing one of its biggest challenges ever in terms of providing mobile users with the necessary bandwidth to drive all the applications people need and want on the go," said William J. Merritt, President and Chief Executive Officer of InterDigital. "Our ambitious effort on Next Generation Cellular directly addresses this impending bandwidth crunch and fits perfectly with InterDigital's reputation for solving the industry's toughest technical problems."

During her presentation at the LTE World conference, Dr. Zeira will focus on the company's roadmap for "bigger pipes" and elaborate on the novel Fuzzy Cell approach for leveraging existing resources to improve spectral efficiency and cell-edge performance. While cellular networks have become virtually ubiquitous, users continue to experience inconsistent and unpredictable performance when moving around. While this degradation is often the result of network congestion or an obstructed path of the radio waves, it is also inherent to traditional cellular deployments, whereby signals degrade towards the fringe of any given cell due to interference from neighboring cells. Typical users experience a degradation of signal throughput, known as being at the cell-edge, the majority of the time. Because of this, advancements in HSPA and LTE, which primarily increase peak data rates at the center of the cell, only offer modest improvements in average performance throughout a cell.

In a traditional deployment, a device connects to one site at a time (even if multiple sub-bands are used at each site) and all sites use the same power levels and sector orientations for all sub-bands. In a Fuzzy Cell deployment, a device may connect to multiple sites at a time through the different sub-bands and continue to realize full system bandwidth. The power levels and sector orientations of the different sub-bands are optimized for best performance. In simpler terms, the device exploits the best combination of base station support regardless of its position, removing traditional limitations of cell or sector boundaries. Importantly, Fuzzy Cell technology can also allow gains indoors as it allows connection to more than one cell/sector at a time as available. The Fuzzy Cell technology provides additional improvement over Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) methods that are supported by current specifications.