ZTE’s latest 5G innovative technologies and achievements

As of the third quarter of 2020, my country’s three major operators have built 690,000 5G base stations, and have basically fully opened 5G SA networks, and the pace of 5G commercialization is leading the world. As a leading equipment supplier in the industry, ZTE has so far shipped 250,000 5G base stations in the Chinese market, and 100% completed the delivery and installation of the 5G Phase II equipment, and has worked with operators on network construction, performance improvement, and industry Comprehensive and in-depth cooperation in applications and other aspects, building 5G benchmark networks in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities, realizing super-gigabit continuous coverage experience, and helping the three major operators to quickly achieve 5G SA large-scale deployment.

5G construction has contributed an important force. Faced with the continuous expansion of the scale of 5G networks, the continuous increase of 5G users and the gradual enrichment of business applications, operators have increasingly higher requirements for the performance and efficiency of 5G networks. As far as equipment manufacturers are concerned, only by constantly introducing and innovating, can they continue to promote the healthy and prosperous development of 5G together with operators. So how does ZTE continuously input innovation power for the development of 5G? During the 2020 China Mobile Global Partner Conference, Bai Yanmin, Vice President of ZTE Corporation and General Manager of RAN Products, introduced ZTE’s latest 5G technology innovations and achievements in an interview. Create a 5G basic network with the best performance and price 5G must first build a network with wide coverage and good experience for the 2C market. From the perspective of operators, it is of course hoped that this network will be economical and good, with both quality and efficiency. To this end, ZTE has successively launched a series of innovative solutions this year to help operators save investment in construction and maintenance, improve resource utilization, and build 5G networks with the best performance and price from multiple dimensions such as better experience, improved efficiency, and simplified operations. SSB 1+X three-dimensional collaborative coverage: making Massive MIMO more efficient As we all know, Massive MIMO is the core technology of 5G NR, and it is a key promoter of improving 5G network coverage and capacity. It can flexibly adjust the direction and shape of multiple beams in a three-dimensional space to accurately match different coverage scenarios and enhance signal coverage. And to reduce interference, it can also use spatial multiplexing and multi-user multiplexing to improve user experience and system capacity.

To cope with the CBD building coverage of high-value word-of-mouth scenarios, ZTE Corporation, based on the profound accumulation of Massive MIMO technology, has innovatively proposed the SSB 1+X three-dimensional collaborative coverage solution: “1” power-enhanced horizontal wide beams form basic coverage to achieve 7 or 8 beams have equivalent horizontal dimension coverage performance; at the same time, “N” vertical beams can be flexibly configured according to the coverage scenario as needed to increase the vertical coverage rate and increase the coverage performance of high-rise buildings by more than 30%.

In addition to improving coverage, the SSB 1+X three-dimensional coordinated coverage solution has simplified beams and reduced public resource overhead, and has better performance in the edge handover area. The measured downlink pull rate is increased by nearly 5%. At the same time, due to the lower proportion of time slots and symbols occupied, the power consumption of AAU equipment can be further reduced by 5%-10% in conjunction with symbol turn-off during low load periods. eDAS: Revitalize traditional room division In the 5G era, a large amount of business and traffic will occur indoors.

With the preliminary completion of 5G coverage in major cities across the country in 2020, the need for 5G coverage to expand indoors is becoming more and more urgent. But the problem is that more than 80% of the existing passive room sub-systems deployed by operators in the past are single-channel DAS, which can only support single-stream and cannot meet the needs of 5G services. Instead, they need to increase the number of channels to increase capacity. The cost is very high. How to use the old traditional room to achieve performance improvement at low cost? In response to this problem, ZTE proposed the eDAS solution, which can jointly receive and transmit different channels of one or more RRUs on the basis of the old DAS system, so that the traditional room division has the ability to transmit and receive multiple antennas. Realize the traditional room distribution to support 5G multi-stream, thus realize the smooth upgrade of the existing network room distribution system to 5G, and revitalize the existing assets of the operator. At present, eDAS has been commercialized on a large scale in more than ten provinces including Guangzhou, Beijing, Shandong, Zhejiang, etc., significantly improving the performance of 5G indoor distribution. PowerPilot: Make the network greener Building a green 5G network can help operators reduce network costs, and it is the social responsibility of the industry. On the one hand, ZTE’s 5G equipment uses self-developed highly integrated, high computing power chips and high-efficiency power amplifiers to reduce the power consumption of base station equipment and build a green network from the root. On the other hand, it also launched the PowerPilot network energy-saving solution. In addition to basic energy-saving technologies such as traditional carrier/channel/symbol shutdown and deep sleep, AI algorithms can be further introduced to comprehensively evaluate from multiple dimensions of time, space and frequency. , Predict the traffic demand according to the cell, and generate an accurate energy-saving strategy for each site, so as to maximize the reduction of network energy consumption without affecting the user experience. Build the core capabilities of industry digitalization The more important value of 5G lies in toB, which is to enable digital transformation in all walks of life. Facing the broad B-end market, with a basic network with the best performance and price, of course, it is necessary to further inject the core power of the network to expand to B. Bai Yanmin said that for the 5G toB market, ZTE provides multi-layer capabilities: first, it provides 5G atomic capabilities, such as large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability, high-precision positioning and other basic capabilities required by industry applications; The needs of different industries and applications match basic capabilities on demand, and provide industry users with deterministic network capabilities. ZTE has proven its 5G multi-layer capabilities through actual cases. In June of this year, ZTE and Guangzhou Mobile deployed the world’s first wireless PRB hard isolation slicing solution in the 5G SA environment, and built an end-to-end 5G subway slicing in the Guangzhou Tower Metro. Compared with wireless slicing technology based on QoS scheduling, slicing based on wireless PRB resource reservation can provide hard isolation similar to dedicated wireless spectrum resources, and support flexible PRB resource exclusive and sharing strategies. In the 5G toB era, based on technologies such as 5G network slicing and edge computing, operators will provide enterprises with virtual private networks to help them achieve digital and intelligent upgrades. The 5G virtual private network can offload and unload data related to enterprise production and operation locally, and sink the computing power locally, thereby ensuring low-latency, high-reliability network capabilities and data not leaving the campus, enabling high-definition video Industry applications such as backhaul, AGV navigation, and remote control promote the digital transformation of enterprises. In order to help a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises quickly build virtual private networks in the campus, ZTE provides a unique NodeEngine base station engine solution in the industry. It only needs to insert a single board into the BBU of the 5G base station to sink the computing power to the very edge of the network. It also realizes the distribution and offloading of traffic locally in the enterprise, which can help operators “response to changes with the same” and expand the 5G toB market flexibly and efficiently. Cross-border integration to advance the toB market in depth Bai Yanmin said that compared with previous generations of mobile communication technologies, 5G relies on the ability of large bandwidth, high reliability, low latency, and massive connections, and is integrated with cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, which can activate a large number of previous factors. For industry applications that are limited by network capabilities and lead to poor experience or impossible to achieve, the scope of applications will be fully expanded to various industries and fields, far beyond the traditional communications and mobile Internet. However, unlike mobile networks in the past, which are mainly oriented towards To C consistency requirements, the fragmentation of market demand in the 5G industry is very obvious-different industry fields, and even different scenarios in the same industry, have different requirements for cloud-network integration services. At the same time, large and medium-sized enterprises generally have requirements for multi-technology heterogeneous collaboration, low TCO, end-to-end service assurance, high security, and autonomous control. These also bring new challenges to the expansion of 5G to B. In the face of opportunities and challenges, ZTE is committed to building a precise cloud and deterministic network architecture by integrating 5G with cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies to provide 5G end-to-end connectivity, MEC edge computing, and end-to-end Capabilities such as end network slicing, as well as five ambassadors platforms such as video cloud, industry Internet of things, robot AI, end-to-end security, and high-precision positioning, are value-driven and flexibly respond to the ever-changing industry needs. At present, ZTE is cooperating with operators and partners in multiple industries such as finance, agriculture, industry, education, and entertainment to actively explore the digital transformation of the industry based on the comprehensive capabilities of 5G + cloud + AI + big data, and extensively carry out 5G innovation Applied practice and created a series of successful models. Specifically, ZTE has developed more than 500 partners in 15 industry sectors, jointly explored 86 5G innovative application scenarios, and successfully carried out more than 60 demonstration projects globally. Typical domestic projects such as Sany Heavy Industry and Zhejiang Supcon, Yankuang Group, Suning Group, Xinhua News Agency, GAC Group, Chery Automobile, China Southern Power Grid, Lv Mama, etc. Bai Yanmin finally looks forward to the fact that with the large-scale deployment of my country’s 5G SA, China’s 5G industry applications have moved towards full-scale digitalization, networking and intelligence. In the next step, the SA network architecture will allow the network to change from quantity to quality and become 5G. The fertile soil for industry application development accelerates the digital transformation of all industries.