Huawei Sword refers to the absolute king of 5G leading Sub-6GHz

Hu Houkun, vice chairman and rotating CEO of Huawei [microblogging] stressed that the current industry is more self-developed, and there are not many intersections, such as isolated chimneys. The industry should abandon the traditional “chimney” innovation model and increase cooperation with vertical industries, so that 5G key technologies and standards fully reflect the needs of various industries; at the same time, technology providers, operators and other industries should work together and come together. Establish test networks for different vertical industries as soon as possible.

“I announced that the 2015 5G Outstanding Contribution Award was won by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.!” As the judges’ voices fell, the industry’s long-awaited world’s first 5G award – the 5G Outstanding Contribution Award from Informa The winners finally came to the conference at the conference of the LTE World Summit on June 24. Huawei won this 5G first prize with a very high gold content - the winning prize in the reasonable, unexpected surprise.

Because of the fierce competition in this award, all the communication equipment giants in the world participated in the competition. The jury composed of industry experts conducted rigorous research, verification and comparison on the industrial contribution of the nominated enterprises, and finally awarded this award to Huawei. Then, what kind of contribution does Huawei stand out in this award and win the top spot?

Concept: Leading the way

The rise of the industry's 5G topic is only a matter of one or two years, and Huawei's investment in 5G innovation has been six years. In 2011, just as the industry was entangled in the development direction of next-generation mobile communications, Huawei relied on years of research and accumulation to propose the three dimensions of “bandwidth”, “time delay” and “connection number” through HyperService Cube. Describe the future 5G demand, set aside the fog in front of the industry, and point out the way forward; due to its scientific and quantifiable nature, HyperService Cube has been widely recognized and accepted by the industry since its launch, and is a group of authoritative industry organizations such as ITU. , NGMN and METIS, adopted and used.

At the same time, corresponding to the three dimensions of “bandwidth”, “delay” and “connections”, Huawei has identified three major application areas for the next generation of mobile communication, namely, enhanced mobile broadband, high reliability and low latency communication. Communicate with large-scale machines. Based on the high diversity of 5G applications, Huawei is the first to promote the 5G global standard in the industry.

Why is Huawei able to lead the 5G concept? Let us look at a set of figures: Huawei started 5G research in 2009, and it is expected to invest more than 600 million US dollars in 5G research and innovation by 2018. So far, Huawei has 9 major 5G research centers and more than 500 5G experts. As of June 2015, Huawei has published more than 190 5G papers. This group of figures can see Huawei's determination and intensity for 5G investment.

Technology: Constant innovation

The vision of 5G is not simply achieved by a certain technology to improve and improve a certain network performance indicators.

The current LTE evolution introduces Massive-MIMO (large-scale multi-input and multi-output), and 3D-Beamforming and other innovative technologies can effectively improve network throughput and meet the communication requirements of large bandwidth between people; Increased and expanded coverage, Cellular Internet of Things (CIoT) technology also enables existing networks to accommodate the increased number of networked devices and for those devices that require less power and bandwidth to access the Internet of Things.

However, 5G mobile communication networks are faced with more diversified application scenarios, and the ultimate network KPI capability (10Gbps peak rate, 1ms delay, 100 billion connections), which makes revolutionary innovation in 5G air interface technology and network. The architecture has become the only way to go. What is revolutionary innovation? The industry generally believes that in the field of mobile communications, especially the crown jewel-air-port technology, revolutionary innovation requires no antennas (without Massive-MIMO technology), no increase in spectrum, no increase The site's premise is to achieve 300% spectrum efficiency improvement, only such operators have enough driving force to lead the future of 5G, which is the potential commercial value of 5G.

After six years of accumulation, Huawei has contributed new air interface technologies to the industry to meet future challenges, including SCMA, a new multiple access technology that triples the number of connections, and F-OFDM, which flexibly allocates air resources for different applications. Shannon's channel coding, such as Polar Code, is a new air interface technology. These explorations and research results have gradually been recognized by the academic field and the industry, and it is also the most commendable contribution of Huawei.

Practice: repeated verification

Huawei's contribution to the 5G industry is not only the scientific research results of new technologies, but also the verification data obtained by testing new technologies in the real environment.

As a 5G leader, Huawei began to research the field verification of 5G technology as early as 2011, bringing the 5G industry innovation to a new stage.

At present, Huawei has implemented field verification of 5G technology in many countries around the world, such as the 5GIC test bed on the campus of the University of Surrey in the UK, focusing on verifying 5G key technologies under ultra-dense network conditions. The Chengdu field environment focuses on 5G access. Technology, while Shanghai Overseas has launched the verification of 5G cloud baseband.

Through field verification in many places around the world, Huawei has contributed a lot of valuable verification data to the 5G industry, which helps guide the industry in the selection and optimization of new technologies. In addition, these verification data obtained in the real environment prove the technical superiority of 5G, which is conducive to attract more ecosystem partners to join 5G families.

Ecology: cooperation and win-win

5G is an ecological project, and it is impossible to have a unique situation. Huawei 5G has always adhered to this concept and has continued to conduct extensive and in-depth cooperation with top institutions and organizations in different fields in the 5G industry.

One of the primary concerns of the industry today for next-generation mobile communications is spectrum. Spectrum is the blood of the mobile communication industry. Only by obtaining sufficient spectrum resources in time can we provide a powerful stage for powerful 5G technology. In order to meet the ultimate challenges facing the 5G in the future, Huawei is working with partners in various industries to promote the entire industry, including governments, spectrum regulators, operators and solution providers to address spectrum challenges, popularize mobile broadband, and promote society. prosperity. At the same time, Huawei is also closely communicating with major industry organizations to jointly promote the formation of a globally unified 5G standard, laying the foundation for global seamless roaming in the 5G era.

In order to promote the 5G standardization process, Huawei 5G has maintained close cooperation with major 5G industry organizations around the world. Huawei is almost a founding member of all major industry organizations in the industry, including global or regional industry leaders such as 5G PPP, IMT-2020, and 5GMF. Particularly striking is the 5G PPP 5G technology research project. The project team was officially launched in July this year, with a total of 8 research projects, and Huawei led four of them.

Since an important mission of 5G is to extend the mobile communication service from the connection of people to the Internet of Everything, Huawei attaches great importance to maintaining close cooperation with the vertical industry. At present, Huawei has established partnerships with giant BMW [microblogging], Volkswagen, Volvo and IoT industry leaders Siemens and Bosch in the Internet of Vehicles industry.

Research institutions in academia have created a large number of cutting-edge technologies every year, which is the frontier of 5G industry innovation and an important part of the 5G ecosystem responsible for hematopoiesis. Huawei 5G is a huge project that brings together the world's cutting-edge wisdom. Therefore, the scientific research institutions of various universities are naturally important partners for innovation and cooperation that Huawei machines value. Huawei has conducted regular and close cooperation with major universities, such as Harvard University, New York University, Stanford University in North America, Cambridge University in Europe, University of Surrey, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Asia. As of 2014, Huawei has published more than 190 5G academic papers in collaboration with more than 20 leading research institutions around the world. By moving hand in hand with academic institutions, Huawei has maintained a leading position in the industry.

The absolute king of Sub-6GHz

Sub-6GHz, in the field of mobile communications, the operating frequency band below 6GHz is commonly known as the low frequency band.

The 5G research on the frequency band includes Sub-6GHz and high frequency millimeter wave (mmWave). Huawei demonstrated its high-frequency research results at the Barcelona exhibition in 2013 and demonstrated the peak rate of 115Gbps. High frequency prototype.

However, considering that the high frequency has a large transmission loss relative to the Sub-6 GHz band including the conventional cellular frequency band, and the coverage distance is small, it is generally considered that it is mainly used in a hot spot area, and the capacity is increased as a supplementary frequency band under low frequency continuous coverage, which makes 5G on Sub-6GHz is more important than the LTE era to further increase system throughput, reach the target peak rate of 10Gbps, and provide high-speed mobile communication services throughout the network.

Huawei's research on Sub-6GHz can be called the absolute king. Recently, Huawei demonstrated the world's first Sub-6GHz low-frequency prototype and demonstrated the peak rate of 10Gbps. This low-frequency prototype combines the research results of Huawei on the air interface. SCMA Air interface technology such as F-OFDM and Polar Code, and multi-stream Massive-MIMO technology.

Huawei 5G network capabilities have three notable features

User peak rate: 10Gbps. Equivalent to 66 times the 4G network rate.

End-to-end delay: 1ms. 50 times shorter than 4G networks.

Number of connections: 100 billion (2025). The number of connections per million kilometers is 100 times that of the current one.

Extended reading

Huawei 挟TDD+ into the 4.5G era, what is 4.5G?

Huawei has jointly released TDD+ solutions with China Mobile (microblogging) and Japan Softbank. TDD+ is a long-term evolution of TDD technology and is a core component of 4.5G, which means that while moving towards the future 5G, 4.5G will play a key transition role.

Why is there a 4.5G? Wang Tao, president of Huawei's Huawei wireless network product line, said that on the one hand, users' demand for traffic is rising rapidly, exceeding 60% per year, which is a great challenge for operators. According to the industry's forecast of 7 times growth in 2020, existing network technologies cannot be supported. It is expected that the outbreak of data traffic in the future will bring huge impacts and challenges to the carrier network.

At present, LTE networks have been popularized around the world. According to GSA statistics, as of the first quarter of 2015, 393 operators have launched commercial LTE networks in 138 countries. Among them, 34 countries have commercialized 54 TDD networks, which is already one of the mainstream LTE technologies, and the number of TDD networks built by Huawei is over 50%.

For any new network technology, it takes a long period of time from birth, to commercial use, to commercial scale, to end users. Although the 5G standard has started, it will take a long time to reach the end user scale.

"We expect 5G to be commercially available in 2022-2023. During this period, in order to protect the operator's investment and enhance the user experience, it is necessary to continuously evolve 4G technology. This is another reason why 4.5G is proposed." Wang Tao said .

It is understood that since the TD-LTE network was put into commercial use in the world in 2011, the number of users has reached 200 million, and only one mobile phone of China Mobile has exceeded 100 million. The high investment is made for this purpose.

The data shows that in terms of 4G investment alone, the investment amount of the three major operators in 2014 was 110 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 100%. Among them, China Mobile's 4G investment was 75 billion yuan, an increase of 88% year-on-year. With the 4G competition of China Telecom (microblogging) and China Unicom (microblogging) FDD this year, China Mobile's investment will not be less than last year. According to its plan, 4G base stations will be built to 1.2 million by the end of this year.

Technically, TDD+ provides an xGbps-level network experience. The technology of multi-carrier aggregation, 4*4 / 8*8 MIMO, and uplink and downlink 256QAM improves the single-user rate to the xGbps level, greatly improving the speed experience of existing 4G users. In addition, it offers a 10ms low latency experience that enables more innovative business.

Simply put, the existing 4G technology requires 7 minutes to download a 100 megabyte movie, and with TDD+ technology, it takes only 27 seconds to download a 2G movie. TDD+ technology is like a turbocharged car, investing in protecting operators. Maximize benefits while improving user experience.

Recently, Huawei and Shanghai Unicom and China Unicom Network Research Institute launched the world's first pilot based on 4.5G LTE-M (E-Machine to Machine) cellular IoT technology, and piloted the smart parking business in Shanghai.

Of course, as a key technology of 4.5G, TDD+ will not replace 4G and 5G, but it will coexist with it for a long time.