South Korean operator SK Telecom, in partnership with Ericsson, has introduced its Elastic Cell technology, Telecompaper.com reported on July 21, 2014. This technology is expected to become a key enabler for 5G. The Elastic Cell (also known as “Flexible Cell”) technology enables multiple cells near the handset to cooperate for every transmission, thereby creating a user-centric environment, compared to the current cell-centric one where each handset communicates with only one specific cell.

A serving cell receives information on nearby cells from a handset and then selects a group of cells that can improve the network quality in the cell-edge for transmission, all while temporarily turning off cells that cause interferences. As a result, Elastic Cell is expected to provide more seamless data transmission by preventing possible quality degradation that can occur when the handset moves across cell boundaries.

SK Telecom and Ericsson claim the demonstration confirmed that the technology can improve the data transfer rate by up to 50 percent at cell boundary areas compared to the existing LTE network. SK Telecom plans to commercialize Elastic Cell by 2016.