Advanced MIMO
The continued advancement of Massive MIMO antenna systems is key to helping operators expand wide-area 5G coverage. In this interview Qualcomm's Tingfang Ji, senior director of engineering, discusses work focused on sub-band full-duplex, Giga-MIMO and AI-enabled air interface design that can maximize spectral efficiency and throughput.
Demand for mobile data continues to grow at an exponential rate which current spectrum paradigms will be unable to support over time. As we see today, 5G operators are accessing massive amounts of capacity in mmWave frequencies and, on the path towards 6G, the next natural step is into sub-THz bands. Qualcomm's Shay Landis, senior director of technology, sees sub-THz frequencies as key to what 6G will become; in addition to raw speeds, the bands bring higher capacity and lower latency that can both enable new applications and better support existing ones.
Advanced MIMO Demos
Demo Details:
In this video, you’ll see three of our most advanced technology demonstrations presented at MWC 2022 — subband full-duplex communications, upper mid-band expansion with Giga-MIMO, and sub-terahertz with lensed MIMO.
Demo 1: Subband full-duplex communications
In this demonstration, our test network operates in the 3.5GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth. It supports simultaneous data transmission and reception with 2 subband antennas across the entire bandwidth. Subband full duplex enables flexible deployments that can improve system capacity, latency, and efficiency. Here, our research and development takes us another step closer to single frequency full duplex on the path to 6G.
Demo 2: Upper mid-band expansion with Giga-MIMO
The demand for spectrum is growing rapidly as 5G networks connect more devices and expand to new types of deployment. While our system innovations continue to push spectral efficiency to new heights, we continue working on foundational technologies that unlock new spectrum bands. This demonstration visualizes how we can achieve significantly improved system throughput, thanks to the much wider bandwidth available in the 10-24 GHz range. Giga-MIMO unlocks this new spectrum band range for expanded 5G system capacity.
Demo 3: Sub-terahertz with lensed MIMO
In this demonstration, we showcase our pioneering research in sub-terahertz communication. Spectrum is a limited resource and the lifeblood for wireless communications. To enable the path towards 6G, we made spectrum expansion towards terahertz as one of our key research vectors. As visualized in this over-the-air demonstration, sub-terahertz for wireless communications can provide speeds in the 100s of gigabit-per-second throughputs.
Demo Details:
At MWC 2022, Qualcomm showcases new technologies focused on AI-enabled Air Interface. In this video, we guide you through demonstrations of two over-the-air prototypes that utilize machine learning to bring new levels of air interface performance and efficiency.
For the first over-the-air demonstration, we use our test network and a test device based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 5G modem-RF system. There are neural networks running on both the device and network. We compare the performance of different neural network implementations to learn how machine learning can enable more efficient Massive MIMO Systems.
Here, we learned that machine learning can bring better performance and efficiency to the 5G system by exploiting a new data-driven design approach.
For the next demonstration, our team uses our mmWave OTA test network in San Diego. We implement machine learning-based beam management and use a test device to compare that algorithm’s performance and network KPIs against the traditional method of beam management.
