In this video:
- Vendor integration at Bell Canada
- How Universal Spectrum Multiplier works
- Integration and go-to-market options
- The AI-RAN opportunity
- Creating a sensing capability
- Introducing the Pulsone
Last year at MWC, TMN covered Cohere Technologies’ work in a real world city trial with Vodafone that, the operator said, proved the performance of the company’s Universal Spectrum Multiplier (USM) technology.
USM is a technology that can be applied to a base station to enhance spectral efficiency, essentially by using Delay Doppler information – think of a reflection sensing capability a bit like radar – to create represent channels between the base station in the device. The outcome is channel predictions that last longer and can enable more efficient beam forming management for Multi User MIMO. That means more efficient spectrum re-use and therefore increased cell performance.
Following the Vodafone pilot, the company said it was close to an integration at the baseband level with a major equipment manufacturer, which was being encouraged by Bell Canada to include the Cohere USM technology. Just before MWC, Cohere said that it had been piloting an architecture in Bell Canada’s network in which its software was installed on a single server next to the vendor’s gNode B, with the two interacting over an Ethernet interface.
In this video, CEO Ray Dolan brings us up to speed with Cohere’s integration work with vendors, and answers whether the company is closer to announcing a full commercial integration. PLus the opportunities he sees in the AI-RAN.
We’re going to take the world into joint and integrated communications and sensing. A tone is going to meet a pulse in a Pulsone, brought to you by Cohere.
Welcome to the Pulsone
But there’s another output of the technology that underpins USM. As CEO Ray Dolan says, in effect, if USM was hooked up to every base station, it would turn each one into a sensor, able to use the Delay Doppler information to build up a digital picture of the physical environment.
“A sensor and a communicator are coming together to do joint sensing and communication at the scheduling level. OTFS takes that to a more integrated sensing and communication at the PHY layer. So not only is the control plane going to integrate and sense. The physical layer is going to integrate and sense at the same time.
“We’re going to take the world into joint and integrated communications and sensing. For the comms groups it creates localisation opportunities with a digital twin of a physical universe. That’s going to be extremely important inside the enterprise for industrial automation and robotics. And for the radar world they are going to add comms to pulse-based architecture in radar, and the outcome is what we call a pulsone. A tone is going to meet a pulse in a pulsone, brought to you by Cohere.”
Cohere has previously used Pulsone (pronounced more like Pulse-zone, as you’ll hear in the video) in its technical briefings, and mentions it as the OTFS waveform on its site. It also registered it as IP in 2021 – but with ISAC rising up the agenda, it seems we might be hearing more about it as a concept to enable integrated communications with sensing.
