Protocol Stacks

ALCHEMY WIRELESS

Protocol Stacks

We have been working with the 3GPP specifications for over 15 years and have built up expert knowledge in the architecture and design of the layer 2 and 3 protocol stacks needed to support cellular air interface operation.

We have also been responsible for worldwide handset deployments and have implemented, tested and debugged the 3G/HSPA+ protocol of BlackBerry handsets as well as the design of interRAT features, LTE and WiFi interworking.

More recently we have worked with LTE, IMS and NB-IOT.

Protocol Stack Development and Debug

Our technical consultants can provide expertise in the full project lifecycle of protocol stack development, from requirements management and verification, through specification analysis, architecture, software development, hardware integration and system testing.

We have the system architecture and control and data plane skills and experience needed to ensure highly efficient operation, low memory foot print and low power usage. We can help debug and root cause analyse system performance issues.

We are also expert in 2G, LTE and WiFi inter-working and with the operation of these stacks in good detail.

We can offer consultancy to help investigate and help resolve design issues, debug problem scenarios and check on specification compliance.

We also have particular expertise in data plane optimisation and efficient interfacing to the physical layer.

NB-IOT

Release 13 of the 3GPP standards has finalised the specification of NB-IOT which is intended to offer a simple derivative of LTE intended for low-bandwidth IOT applications. With much reduced functionality it should have a far lower cost compared to other versions of LTE, but still offer good enough performance, low power consumption and a much smaller memory footprint.

We have produced a design for the access stratum of NB-IOT intended for integration with any third party physical layer and NAS. As this is a completely new design it carries none of the baggage of a legacy LTE stack. It is optimised for low cost implementations, and leverages our long experience of designing for real-time embedded systems to minimise memory requirements (code and data), but offers a flexible deployment model.

3GPP Expertise

We can provide advice on understanding the role of 3GPP in the cellular industry and on the process of filing change requests to propose amendments to the design and test specifications themselves.

Intellectual Property Rights and Patents

The team have been granted over 100 patents related to operation of the 3GPP specifications and have submitted considerably more over the years. We can offer independent advice on the process of filing patents right through from submission to discovery and litigation, based on our practical experience of the same for a large corporate company.

Why Choose Us ?

We have expertise in architecting and designing systems for real-time embedded systems, particularly interacting state machine design and implementation. We have made extensive use of formal design methodologies such as UML and SDL, including automatic code generation techniques. We understand the challenges involved in object-orientated real-time software design, implementation and testing for reliable, maintainable and efficient commercial products.

ALCHEMY WIRELESS LTD