Company Release - 2/21/2018 8:31 AM ET

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 21, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2018 -- InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC), a mobile technology research and development company, and OPENAIRINTERFACE™ SOFTWARE ALLIANCE (“OSA”) today announced the planned demonstration of a 5G millimeter wave fully digital beamforming prototype integrated with an LTE solution at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from February 26 to March 1, 2018.

The millimeter wave air interface (mmWave) is one of the key new technologies being introduced into 3GPP’s 5G NR standard as an enabler for high data rates and enhanced user experience. The demonstration will showcase some of the fundamental concepts enabling mmWave 5G integration with the existing LTE standard using non-standalone mode. A terminal prototype platform on a moving track will be used to demonstrate mmWave beam management and handover between LTE and mmWave base stations.

“Integrating millimeter wave technology with LTE is not only the most efficient approach to deploying 5G millimeter wave, but it has also demonstrated several performance benefits, especially when coupled with a fully digital beamformer,” said Doug Castor, Senior Director, InterDigital. “Also, use of the OPENAIRINTERFACE™ solution positions us to extend this work with additional research partners.”

The transformation from current beamforming technology, which relies on analog or a hybrid of analog and digital, to fully digital beamforming can result in reduction of latency and improve radio link failure detection and recovery time. Therefore, digital beamforming establishes itself as a promising further improvement for future mmWave architectures.

Attendees of Mobile World Congress can see this demonstration, along with panel discussions and additional 5G-related demos, at InterDigital’s booth in Hall 7, Stand 7C61 .