SK Telecom and Ericsson have successfully demonstrated the Elastic Cell technology on July 21. According to SK Telecom, Elastic Cell is expected to become a key technology for 5G. Demonstrating data transfer rate improved by up to 50 percent at the cell-edge, SK Telecom aims to commercially launch the technology by 2016.

Elastic cell, also known as Flexible Cell, enables multiple cells near the handset to cooperate for every transmission thereby creating a user-centric environment, compared to the current cell-centric one where each handset communicates with only one specific cell. A serving cell receives information on nearby cells from a handset and selects a group of cells that can improve the network quality in the cell-edge for transmission while temporarily turning off the cells that cause interferences. As a result, Elastic Cell can ensure more seamless data transmission by preventing possible quality degradation that can occur when the handset moves across cell boundaries.

According to operator, once applied, Elastic Cell will enable SK Telecom to provide the most optimized network service to each individual device regardless of its location while bringing the company one step closer to achieving the goal of ‘1Gbps data throughput anywhere’ which is also one of major issues in the minds of ‘METIS (Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for the Twenty-twenty Information Society)’, an EU project for 5G research, and 5G Forum, an industry-academia R&D partnership for 5G in Korea. 

Earlier on July 6, the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding at Ericsson’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden for joint research on 5G technologies.