PRESS RELEASE: While attending the Wireless Media and Analyst Roundtable at MWC Barcelona 2024, Eric Zhao, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Solution, noted that 2024 will mark the commercial launch of 5.5G and indicated Huawei is ready to help operators evolve to 5.5G in the most efficient fashion with its GigaGreen portfolio. GigaGreen is Huawei’s latest innovation that was made to provide native 10 Gbps, native green, and native intelligence to deliver 10-fold enhanced capabilities and optimal spectrum, energy, and O&M efficiency.
The Commercial Launch of 5.5G Is Imminent in 2024
In just four years, 5G has become a vital enabler for the digital economy, thanks to its superior Gbps capability and 10-billion connectivity. With the emergence of new changes, scenarios, and demands, network infrastructure has to upgrade to be more powerful. As a key step in mobile development for the next decade, 5.5G will be able to support more diverse services with its 10-fold enhanced capabilities like 10 Gbps speed and 100-billion connectivity as well as new capabilities like Passive IoT (P-IoT) and native intelligence.
All elements of 5.5G are ready. In terms of standards, 3GPP R18, the first version of 5.5G, will be finalized in the first half of 2024. With regards to spectrum, operators are already able to deploy Carrier Aggregation (CA) with three component carriers (3CCs) at scale through multi-carrier TDD and multi-band FDD technologies, as well as through technologies offered by the maturing mmWave and 6 GHz domains. As for terminals, a myriad of products including chipsets, smartphones, and home CPEs have been launched. In terms of technologies, many operators are verifying 10 Gbps capabilities of 5.5G and other key technologies such as Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), Reduced Capability (RedCap), IoT, and Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X), as well as their applications for connecting people, things, vehicles, industries, and homes.
3 Native Capabilities of GigaGreen Power Efficient 5.5G Networks
Native 10 Gbps for Superior Experience
TDD Extremely Large Antenna Array (ELAA) is beneficial on 5G networks, but it is absolutely essential on 5.5G networks in order to achieve ubiquitous 10 Gbps. Evidence has shown that ELAA use on 5G networks greatly improves TDD coverage and energy efficiency. In the 5.5G era, given that operators will have contiguous large-bandwidth spectrum, ELAA will be able to extend more bands and have more antenna elements. This means that high frequency bands will be used to achieve both 10 Gbps downlink and continuous coverage.
FDD ultra-wideband beamforming will unlock the full potential of 100 MHz bandwidth. Operators have abundant, but fragmented, spectrum resources on 700 MHz, 800 MHz, and 900 MHz as well as 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, and 2600 MHz, with narrow bandwidth scattered in multi-RAT coexistence. Huawei has developed innovative technologies, such as virtual large carriers (MBSC), to re-engineer non-contiguous spectrum, enabling coordinated use of these spectra efficiently in liaison with FDD beamforming to greatly boost downlink speeds. This way, incumbent resources on 5G networks are consolidated on demand to facilitate the evolution to 5.5G, thereby protecting operators’ investments.
Native Green Design Enables “0 Bit and 0 Watt” for Superior Energy Efficiency
Huawei’s native green system comes from end-to-end innovation in devices, sites, and networks to comprehensively improve operators’ energy efficiency.
Native green for devices: Energy savings can come from using more energy-efficient devices. Huawei maximizes the capabilities of passive parts to improve the energy transmission efficiency in two ways: signal direct injection feeding (SDIF) to improve the antenna efficiency and Meta lens to reduce the spatial dissipation of energy. The RF power amplifier accounts for 70% of the total power consumption of active parts. Huawei provides the industry’s first adaptive power amplifiers. Based on its accurate algorithm and special architecture, the power amplifier can adapt to different loads to maintain the maximum efficiency at all times.
Native green for sites: Huawei’s 5.5G products and solutions support deep dormancy and fast wake-up. In the dormant state, the devices use less than 10 W of power, and they can be woken on-demand and within minutes, which ensures service continuity. Millisecond-level shutdown and fast wake-up do not compromise the user experience or coverage, and they contribute significantly to energy savings by ensuring energy efficiency at all times and under all loads. Commercial network tests show that the daily energy savings exceed 40%.
Native green for networks: Huawei’s 5.5G networks use intelligent algorithms to generate optimal energy-saving policies based on customer intents through four-domain management, including time, space, frequency, and power, all while maintaining stable network performance. Tests show that intelligent optimization can additionally reduce energy consumption by 8% for the energy saving features on commercial networks.
Native Intelligence: L4 Intelligence for Efficient O&M
5.5G has to provide more connections to an even wider range of services over more bands. This means it must evolve towards L4 and beyond. Based on its three-layer architecture, Huawei IntelligentRAN now introduces the communication model at the cloud layer and the digital twin system at the network layer.
Huawei IntelligentRAN 2.0 will support fault prevention and prediction, and this will sunset responsive O&M and replace it with proactive O&M. It will infer service intents and ensure deterministic service experience. And it will support multi-objective decision-making to optimize the service experiences and network energy efficiency.
Zhao concluded his keynote speech saying that, “Huawei’s GigaGreen and IntelligentRAN solutions are designed to help operators smoothly and efficiently evolve to 5.5G. Huawei will continue to work with industry partners to usher in the 5.5G era and push the wireless industry to a new horizon, wider horizon.”