As part of its portfolio expansion, Nokia has launched a range of new AirScale products, including compact dual- and tri-band remote radio heads to meet cellular site deployment requirements. It has also introduced several high-performance, massive MIMO adaptive antennas to deliver 5G coverage and high capacity. These new upgrades support both 4G and 5G networks today, increase cellular capacity, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), bringing 5G experiences to businesses and consumers faster.
 
Nokia's Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) solution, delivered as a software update to existing Nokia AirScale base stations, goes beyond 4G-5G to include dynamic spectrum sharing between 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies, enabling a seamless evolution to 5G deployments. The 4G-5G DSS feature, which has garnered interest from operators in major 5G markets, automatically coordinates spectrum usage between 4G and 5G, helping them repurpose existing 4G radio networks and accelerate 5G deployment. Typically, 5G is launched in the higher mmWave or cmWave bands, while existing 4G is deployed in the lower spectrum range. By repurposing the lower-frequency 4G spectrum, 5G coverage can be achieved faster and at a lower cost. Initial deliveries of Nokia's DSS solution are expected to begin in April 2020, with volume shipments anticipated by July, in line with the availability of DSS-enabled mobile devices.
 
Nokia has also announced a number of innovations in its 5G cloud radio access network (RAN), including the Nokia AirScale All-in-Cloud base station. This virtualizes the baseband in real time and places baseband processing power at the network edge to meet extremely low latency requirements, thereby increasing network efficiency. Furthermore, Nokia Bell Labs is demonstrating a prototype of the next evolutionary step in this domain to customers: the Nokia AirScale cloud-native RAN. This will implement the characteristics of a cloud-native environment, enabling flexible RAN decomposition into a service-based architecture. It will be supported by edge infrastructure and chipsets from Nokia's "Powered by ReefShark" portfolio, as well as a selection of central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), further boosting 5G network performance.