LONDON, Nov. 24, 2017 — At the Global Mobile Broadband Forum (Global MBBF), Edward Deng, President of Huawei Wireless Network Product Line, delivered a keynote speech on “Embracing 5G Era Mobile Network”. He elaborated upon the unprecedented opportunities and huge challenges faced by operators in the era of 5G, especially in terms of how mobile networks satisfy requirements of diverse services and connectivity. Huawei proposed the most important elements for the future mobile network: 5G Era SingleRAN, Mobile Cloud, and Wireless Intelligence, which aim to help operators build a single network that provides a diverse range of services. Such a network also helps to rapidly seize new business opportunities at low costs and achieve sustainable growth in the process towards realizing a digitalized society.
Embracing 5G Era Mobile Network to Address New Opportunities and Challenges
The next decade will be a new era of 5G featuring the rapid development of new services and requirements in the wireless communications industry. Edward Deng believes that operators’ top priority is to build a single mobile network that meets the demands of a super connected society and industry development. This requires the fostering of three key capabilities:
- Powerful network capability to meet divergent requirements for capacity, coverage, and latency of a wide range of services
- An agile and flexible network architecture to improve the efficiency of multi-service connections
- Intelligent network management to provide efficient network O&M and optimization of diversified service experience
Powerful Network Capability: 5G Era SingleRAN Provides Full Support for Diverse Services on a Single Network
The diversity of IoT applications and scenarios poses high and divergent requirements for network capabilities. Capacity must be improved from single to double digit Gbps data rates for the upcoming 5G era. Similarly, population coverage must be expanded to cater for geographical coverage, while reducing latency from 10 ms to ms level.
At the Global MBBF, Huawei released the portfolios of 5G Era SingleRAN that boast higher capacity, wider coverage, and low latency with high reliability. This solution will enable operators to offer diverse services on a single network. This solution adopts simple and highly integrated 5G sites to deliver ultra-high capacity. A series of low-cost innovative sites can be used to improve the depth and width of scenario-specific network coverage, while supporting the latest protocol and architecture to support ms level latency. Edward Deng indicated that, “5G Era SingleRAN can maximize the value of existing networks and promote a smooth evolution to 5G. Enhanced capabilities help enable a mobile network to support a multitude of services.”
Agile Network Architecture: Mobile Cloud Supports Flexible Deployment and Agile Provisioning of Diverse Services on a Single Network
At the Global MBBF 2016 held in Tokyo, Huawei released the Mobile Cloud solution, which includes CloudEdge, CloudAIR, and CloudRAN. These solutions help to usher in a new era of mobile cloud. Edward Deng emphasized that, “Mobile Cloud can maximize the value of operator assets to enable efficient resource utilization, on-demand deployment, and agile service provisioning. This solution allows operators to build mobile networks for all industries.”
CloudAIR cloudifies an air interface to efficiently share spectrum, power, and channel resources. This innovation can enhance air interface utilization, while allowing for flexible network deployment and improving user experience. Over the past year, over 30 networks have commercially launched CloudAIR. And by the end of 2018, over 100 networks will use this cutting-edge solution. “Huawei is dedicated to constant innovation and CloudAIR will continue to pursue better performance.” Edward Deng announced the debut of CloudAIR 2.0, which at least doubles GUL spectrum sharing efficiency. LTE and 5G NR can share the spectrum in both time and frequency domains to achieve more flexible and higher proportion of resource sharing. CloudAIR is set to help operators upgrade spectrum efficiency and accelerate the deployment of 5G networks.
Efficient Network Management: Wireless Intelligence Allows Low-cost Deployment of New Services on a Single Network with Reduced OPEX
In the 2020-oriented 5G era, the complexity of mobile networks will far exceed current networks. Traditional methods and tools will struggle to meet new business requirements. Wireless intelligence emerges as an exemplary solution. Edward Deng highlighted that, “Wireless intelligence and mobile networks have already revolutionized the world and will further reshape the future. In the best era soon to arrive, these two technologies are poised to meet and combine to offer more innovations.”
Wireless intelligence serves as a smart brain to create three customer values:
- Enable automatic and smart O&M to make things simple.
- Inspire network potential to achieve the best network performance and empower new capabilities.
- Make the impossible possible and provide automation solutions to issues that cannot be resolved by onsite personnel.
In partnership with top global operators, Huawei has achieved remarkable progress in discussions and joint tests on related use cases.
For example, Massive MIMO is the most important technology of high-capacity 5G base stations and applies to complex scenarios with dynamic traffic scenarios. However, the configuration and optimization of multi-antenna beam parameters prove to be an obstacle. SoftBank and Huawei launched the wireless intelligence based adaptive solution for Massive MIMO. This solution can automatically select the best parameter combination from nearly 300 options to achieve dynamic coverage based on user distribution and scenario. This adaptation can also help to considerably improve cell capacity and user experience.
Another innovation of wireless intelligence is splitting each cell into thousands of virtual grids. Each grid can collect a large amount of data to perform intelligent training and maximize the value of network optimization in a smaller scale. Wireless networks perform structured processing on real-time and historical data stored in virtual grids and then generate a “network fingerprint”. With the machine learning algorithm, wireless networks can implement refined and intelligent scheduling of radio resources. For example, grid-level historical data helps determine signal quality of each carrier. The intelligent scheduling algorithm ensures that a device is always running on the best carriers and therefore can deliver the best user experience.
5G Era SingleRAN, Mobile Cloud, and Wireless Intelligence are the most important elements of the future network. They will collectively help operators build 2020-oriented mobile networks for diverse services and quickly seize new business opportunities at low costs. Edward Deng concluded his speech with a promising vision. Looking forward to the 2020s, Huawei plans to work with more operators and industry partners to promote the prosperity of the mobile industry and realize “Everyone on Mobile, Everything with Wireless, and Every Industry plus Wireless”.
