At today’s World Mobile World Congress (MWC) held in Barcelona, Spain, Yang Chaobin, President of Huawei 5G Product Line, unveiled a full range of end-to-end (E2E) 3GPP-compliant 5G product solutions. This release covers the core network, the bearer network, base station, and terminals. Huawei’s 5G product solutions are entirely based on 3GPP standards, with full range, full scenario, and all-cloud being the defining characteristics. The featured products are also the only available options within the industry to provide 5G E2E capabilities.
The first wave of 5G deployment will take place in buildings and densely populated urban areas. Diverse site forms are therefore required to accommodate the needs of complex deployment scenarios, offering continuous coverage and fulfill capacity requirements of indoor and outdoor hotspots. Huawei’s newly released full range of 5G product solutions support millimeter wave (mmWave), C-band, and all Sub-3 GHz frequency bands. These products also cover all site forms including tower sites, pole sites, and small cells.
Huawei launched the C-band 64T64R and 32T32R Massive MIMO AAUs to deliver ubiquitous Gbps experience. These AAUs support 200 MHz large bandwidth and 3D beamforming to cover buildings, offer uniform coverage, and meet the demands of various other scenarios. Coverage can be flexibly adjusted to optimize the experience for users at the near points and far points, and generate a 20 or 30 times increase in network capacity. mmWave products are suited to supporting 1 GHz bandwidth. The equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) of Antenna ports reaches 65 dBm, ranking first within the industry.
Huawei wireless products boast an integrated, compact, and lightweight design. These features greatly relax the requirements on the antenna installation platform while reducing engineering complexity. All products support diverse scenarios in centralized radio access network (C-RAN) and distributed radio access network (D-RAN) deployment mode. The optical interface speed is less than 25 Gbps, which is ideal for large-scale 5G deployment.
In addition, the newly released compact 5G Massive MIMO products working in the C-band and mmWave allow for deployment on street lamp poles to fill coverage holes and boost hotspot capacity. The 5G LampSite is backwards-compatible with 4G. Existing CAT6A network cables or fiber optic cables can be used to achieve indoor 4G and 5G co-deployment with zero cable adjustment or site addition.
In the 5G era, wireless sites will be deployed in hybrid D-RAN and C-RAN networking scenarios. Huawei launched BBU5900 and CBU5900 to suit distributed and centralized sites, respectively. BBU5900 is the most highly integrated site solution currently available in the industry. It supports all RATs (2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G) and all frequency bands, and offers 50 Gbps backhaul capability to meet 5G services’ long-term development needs. CBU5900 features the centralized deployment of a large number of baseband units to support the C-RAN architecture. Using CBU5900 help to simplify remote sites, reduces the demands for air-conditioned equipment rooms, and contributes to quick satellite clock synchronization across the entire network. This approach also reduces the number of site visits during maintenance and installation, and considerably lowers future site maintenance and expansion costs. In addition, it will boost performance of the entire network via large-scale close coordination.
5G Bearer Networks: Diverse active and passive solutions using 5G microwave and IPRAN to fully meet 5G networks’ ultra-large capacity requirements
5G networks must feature 10 GE transmission capability to the site and 50 GE/100 GE transmission capability from fiber optic cables to access rings, fulfilling the ultra-large capacity requirements of multiple 5G eMBB services. In a C-RAN scenario, the transmission speed between the centralized equipment room and the site must reach 100 Gbps. Such requirements pose enormous challenges to operators’ mobile bearer networks. The current release includes a range of Huawei 5G bearer product combinations that suit various scenarios, use different media, and take many distinct forms. In backhaul scenarios, 5G microwave series products are able to offer 10 Gbps high data rate and 25 µs low latency when traditional microwave frequency bands are used. 50 GE/100 GE adaptive slicing routers support smooth evolution from 10 GE to 50 GE and 100 GE. This allows operators to implement on-demand deployment. The active FO OTN fronthaul solution supports up to 15 channels of service access, hitless switching, and integrated access for multiple services. The Centralized WDM fronthaul solution uses innovative colorless optical modules to simplify site delivery and operation and maintenance (O&M). Huawei X-Haul 5G bearer solution supports multiple technologies, such as IP, OTN, and microwave. The aim is to help operators resolve bearer network issues in large-scale 5G deployment.
5G Core Networks: Enabling all-industry digitalization through all-cloud architecture, on-demand deployment, and smooth evolution
Based on the all-cloud architecture, Huawei’s 5G core network solution uses microservice-centric architecture (MCA) to simultaneously support 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G and realize a smooth evolution from non-standalone (NSA) to standalone (SA). Meanwhile, unlike the traditional network architecture, Huawei’s 5G all-cloud core network uses a distributed architecture based on control plane and user plane separation (CUPS) to help operators deploy the control plane at the central DC and flexibly deploy the user plane according to the service scenarios. For example, for eMBB services such as augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) and HD IPTV over WTTx, the user plane can be deployed at the network edge to minimize the roundabout traffic on the backbone network, achieve ultra-low latency, and eradicate congestion. The all-cloud 5G core network is also the basis of network slicing. As the new business model of 5G era, network slice will help operators to provide various services via a single network. This will enable the business transformation from the mass market to the vertical industry market, while supporting the digitalization of the entire industry.
5G Terminal: World’s only commercial product with small size and low consumption to provide fiber-like access experience of wireless home broadband
Huawei also released a range of 5G terminals at MWC 2018. Huawei’s 5G customer premise equipment (CPE) is developed based on the 3GPP standards and chipset architecture. It is compact in size, low in power consumption, and highly portable. As the smallest 5G commercial terminal in the world, it supports C-band and mmWave. In Seoul and Canada, there have been the world’s first wave of 5G subscriber who use Huawei’s commercial 5G terminals. Based on 3.5 GHz and mmWave, users can enjoy a fiber-like experience of wireless home broadband services with the rate exceeding 2 Gbps. In addition, Huawei will launch 5G smart phones in 2019.
2018 will be remembered as the first year that marks the beginning of the 5G era. Using a full range of leading and mature 5G E2E full-scenario product solutions, Huawei has realized the continuous deployment of 5G sites in more than 10 countries, such as China, Korea, Canada, Germany, UK, and Italy. In typical densely-populated urban areas, these product solutions have provided ubiquitous Gbps-level access rate, hundreds of Mbps of indoor access experience, and over 20 Gbps cell capacity.
