Harmony Enhanced MultiCarrier

DragonWave’s Harmony Enhanced MultiCarrier (MC) is a dual carrier point to point microwave radio platform that covers licensed frequency bands in 6 GHz, 11 GHz, 15 GHz, 18 GHz and 23 GHz. New variants are being introduced to extend that frequency coverage downwards to 6 GHz and upwards to 38 GHz.

Harmony Enhanced MC carries up to 2 gigabit per second (2 Gbps) per radio in a single 56 MHz channel with DragonWave’s unique Bandwidth Accelerator (BAC) and up to 2 gigabit per second (2 Gbps) without BAC in a single 112 MHz channel with XPIC. Harmony Enhanced MC is conceptually two Harmony Enhanced radios integrated into a single network element with an integrated dual polarization radio mount and increased transmit power for even better (the world’s best!) system gain and performance.

Harmony Enhanced MC links typically cover line-of-sight distances between 500 m and 40 km, but links can be as short as a few hundred meters to connect nearby buildings on a campus and as long as 120 km to connect very remote areas. Maximum link length is determined by terrain, antenna height, antenna size (antenna gain), climate (rain zone), the selected frequency band and channel size, required data rate (link capacity) and the desired link availability target. If you want us to plan one or more Harmony Enhanced MC links for you, please click here.

Unique Feature Mix leading to the Lowest Total Cost of Ownership

Harmony Enhanced MC packs a veritably unique and balanced feature mix that can materially reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO); the cost of buying and operating a link during a typical 5 to 15-year life cycle.

Harmony Enhanced MC:

Has the best system gain in the world.
Has two high-power radio carriers arranged in two polarizations. In this way, double-capacity dual-carrier configurations can be implemented using just one radio channel, instead of two radio channels, doubling spectral efficiency.
Is a zero-footprint, all-outdoor, self-contained, dual-carrier microwave radio system. There’s no indoor units (IDUs) to deploy as with legacy split-mount microwave radio systems, and there’s no need for (acclimatized) shelters either.
Is blessed with a high port density: 2 electrical Gigabit Ethernet ports, 1 Gigabit Ethernet SFP receptacle and one SFP+ 10 Gigabit Ethernet receptacle.
Has a fully integrated non-blocking 38 Gbps Ethernet switch with Customer Bridging, Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP & MSTP), Link Aggregation (LAG) between the 4 user interface ports and Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP).
Features Bandwidth Accelerator or BAC, a unique DragonWave feature where all data headers and all payload are compressed at wire speed prior to sending them across a radio link. Competitors only support header compression, which is inefficient, because headers represent just a small fraction of the overall payload. Depending on the traffic compressibility, BAC can increase link throughput by 3% up to and beyond a whopping 112%.
Supports Cross Polarization Interference Cancellation (XPIC) enabling a single dual-carrier Harmony Enhanced MC radio deployed at each end of a link to transmit and receive on the same radio channel on both the vertical and horizontal polarization. Link capacity is 1 Gbps in a single 56 MHz channel without BAC and up to 2 Gbps with BAC or up to 2 gigabit per second (2 Gbps) without BAC in a single 112 MHz channel.
Supports on-air 256 AES, which is unique for an all-outdoor microwave radio. 256 AES is a strong symmetrical cypher that renders eavesdropping on a Harmony Enhanced MC link pointless and is recommended for links transporting highly sensitive data.
Has the best Graphical User Interface (GUI) that money can buy. Many of our customers that have hands-on experience with a different vendor’s microwave radio system have attested that our Harmony products are best-in-class when it comes to configuring them in the field or remotely using the inbuilt GUI.

How Harmony Enhanced MC Pares Down Total Cost of Ownership

Surprisingly, the actual cost of buying a microwave radio (MWR) link typically represents just 20% or so of a relatively short 5 to 7-year TCO. The remaining 80% of the TCO is composed of a spectrum (frequency) license fees, tower rent, maintenance, and energy bills. Minimizing the deployment footprint and maintenance cost while maximizing spectral efficiency, thus affects TCO most. For comparison: a 20% cost reduction in equipment yields just a measly 4% TCO reduction over 5-7 years.

Best System Gain in the World

The best system gain can be leveraged to achieve (a combination of):

Building the longest links – in certain cases enabling replacing an A to B to C chain (two links) by a single A to C hop (one link) without compromising link bandwidth or robustness. The savings of replacing 2 links with a single (slightly more costly due to larger antennas) link, by eliminating a site in-between, are obvious.
Building the same link with significantly smaller (one to two sizes per end) antennas. This can save a lot in terms of tower or site rent, or conversely, enable the use of lighter and much cheaper tower and site infrastructure, due to the significantly reduced dynamic wind loading and static loading (mass) of the smaller antennas.
Pushing more data through the same link, without adding new radio hardware and/or allocating and renting additional spectrum.
The most resilient, high-availability links thanks to a much higher fading margin and virtually no down time. This doesn’t lead to immediate cost savings, but it does improve customer satisfaction and the increased service level can be leveraged to increase the price of the service to the end user.

Dual Carriers arranged in Orthogonal Polarizations (XPIC)

Most competitors’ dual-carrier solutions require cumbersome installation and costly ancillary equipment to arrange the carriers in orthogonal polarizations. DragonWave’s Harmony Enhanced MultiCarrier provides for this desirable feature right out of the box. By adding in the Cross-Polarization Interference Cancellation (XPIC) feature, we can have the two channels tuned on a single frequency and thus double capacity on one channel.

It’s about 30% cheaper to build a dual carrier XPIC configuration with Harmony Enhanced Multicarrier than it is with two discrete Harmony Enhanced units, and despite being lower in cost, the MC set-up has a better system gain. Harmony Enhanced MC is therefore the best dual-carrier dual-polarization solution in the world that money can buy. It beats the competition, both on cost and performance.

All-outdoor Zero-Footprint architecture

This profound product philosophy – fewer is better – cuts back operational expenditures for:

Site construction; no shelters / racks have to be purchased and/or installed,
Site rent; no shelters / racks have to be rented in case 3^rd parties own the site, shelters or racks,
Installation; no IDUs have to be installed,
Spares; as there are no IDUs, no spares are needed for IDUs either,
Repairs; as there are no IDUs, no IDUs have to be repaired either,
Energy bills; as no shelters are needed, there’s no electricity or gas bill for keeping the equipment in the shelter in the desired operating temperature and humidity range,
Network management; in some cases, IDUs are treated as separate network elements by the Network Management System (NMS), which leads to higher licensing & maintenance costs for the NMS.

Integrated Switch & High Port Density

The port density of the Harmony Enhanced MC – four fully-configurable multipurpose ports, including one 10 Gigabit port – coupled to the integrated switch, enables very diverse deployment scenarios on the fixed side of the network, like a dedicated fiber or Ethernet cable for each connected customer, in-band and out-of-band management (a dedicated network management network) and all kinds of network topologies like an (optical) ring, chain, hub-spoke and meshed networks. Optical connectivity is granted straight from the Harmony Enhanced MC radio, spanning up to 120 km on single mode fiber. The high port density and then integrated switch therefore eliminate costly Cell Site Routers (CSRs) in the majority of microwave radio deployment scenarios.

Unique Bandwidth Accelerator

With BAC, wire speed, lossless payload and header compression, more data can be moved from A to B without increasing the channel size or adding additional links or channels. This can obviously lead to very significant savings on spectrum license fees and hardware deployments. BAC can also be used to move the same data through a narrower channel – again cutting spectrum license fees – or to back off modulation so that the increased system gain is used to deploy the link with smaller antennas, leading to lower site rental fees.

Integrated 256 AES Encryption

Having 256 AES encryption, integrated into a zero footprint and all-outdoor microwave radio is a unique DragonWave feature. It adds an additional layer of security, making eavesdropping on a link where this encryption is enabled futile. The savings come from the fact that no dedicated and costly encryption / decryption solution is required for the link.