Chinese carrier China Unicom and Huawei jointly announced the launch of a 5G indoor distributed massive multiple-input-multiple-output solution, both companies said in a release.
This solution applies 5G massive MIMO technology to improve 5G capacity of indoor networks, the companies said.
In the first year of 5G commercial deployment, China Unicom said it has successfully deployed 5G digital indoor systems in key scenarios across China’s major cities. It said it has also integrated 5G with artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing in various industrial solutions.
According to new infrastructure requirements released by the Chinese government in March, 5G networks must provide wider indoor coverage and stronger capabilities to accelerate the applications in vertical industries and support the exploration of new business models. These include telemedicine, distance education, and online office.
The 5G indoor distributed massive MIMO solution was developed based on Huawei’s 5G LampSite Digital Indoor System (DIS). It introduces the Massive MIMO technology to LampSite to form distributed Massive MIMO antenna arrays supporting up to 64T64R ability, the two companies said.
Huawei said that through dynamic coordination among multiple digital indoor headends, the capacity of indoor networks becomes scalable, self-adapting to changes in data traffic. In addition, the company added, compared with the cell splitting approach, both interference and manual commissioning costs are significantly reduced, while also effectively increasing 5G indoor spectral efficiency. As a result, it said networks can support higher capacity and stronger capabilities.
“China Unicom will continue to build 5G networks that provide users with premium experiences and industries with optimal 5G solutions,” said Tang Xiongyan, a chief scientist of China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute. “China Unicom and Huawei have jointly achieved the world’s first commercial deployment of 300 MHz indoor ultra-bandwidth product. This will lay a solid foundation for the efficient deployment of 5G networks. In the future, high capacity and high value scenarios with scalable capacity requirements will increase. This requires network solution innovation beforehand to ensure that one-time deployment supports long-term service demand with minimum network modifications. 5G Indoor Distributed Massive MIMO is an innovation helping address this challenge. We will work with Huawei to verify and optimize this solution in multiple key heavy-traffic scenarios based on historical traffic, ensuring it can better meet indoor 5G demand and reduce the time for scaled commercialization.”
“Based on our long-term investment in indoor digitalization region, we released the full-scenario 5G DIS product and solutions in February 2020 to enable better indoor coverage and superior 5G networks. Faced with growing scalability demand for uplink and downlink capacity, we successfully introduced massive MIMO technology to indoor networks in close collaboration with China Unicom. This technological breakthrough will substantially increase 5G capacity,” said Ritchie Peng, CMO of Huawei’s wireless network product line.
