PARTNER CONTENT: At the China Unicom Global Industry Chain Partners Conference and Technology Innovation Summit Forum on December 7, 2021, China Unicom and Huawei jointly launched the Promotion Initiative for Smart Super Sensing with partners, calling for more joint research, application innovation, and standardization in 5G integrated sensing and communications to build an ecosystem for the smart super sensing industry.

China Unicom and Huawei proposed three new visions at the 5G-Advanced Technology Innovation Conference on May 15, 2021 — smart new vision, smart high uplink, and smart super sensing. To realize these visions, the two have carried out technological innovation, standard formulation, and extensive promotion and achieved valuable results. Smart super sensing breaks the limits of cellular networks, leveraging 5G’s strengths in multi-antenna technology and high bandwidth to enable high-precision sensing for low-altitude drones, transportation, and digital twins and speed up the industrial transformation towards intelligent operations. By launching this initiative, they hope to work with customers and ecosystem partners to accelerate the technological innovation and business applications of smart super sensing.

In his opening speech, Mai Yanzhou, the deputy general manager of China Unicom, emphasized the significance of working with partners in technological innovation. “We believe that partnerships are essential to achieving the goal of building an integrated platform for industries, education, research, and applications.” China Unicom aims to provide comprehensive 5G network services through co-construction and sharing and build a high-quality digital infrastructure and experimental R&D environments for innovations in cloud, networks, devices, edge, and applications while developing an industry ecosystem that encompasses a complete set of new technology application scenarios.

Ma Hongbing, the general manager of China Unicom’s technology innovation division, shared his outlook on smart super sensing as a new direction for 5G-Advanced. “It will enable more application scenarios, which will drive the development of smart transportation, IoV, and drone management.” China Unicom will continue to work with organizations like 3GPP and the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) and industry partners to promote its standardization process. At the same time, China Unicom hopes to work with partners on all aspects of the ecosystem to define requirements and develop an application platform. “Our goal is to make smart super sensing a reality. We hope that all industrial partners can explore the application scenarios with us and advance smart super sensing to new heights in the 5G industry,” said Ma Hongbing.

With smart super sensing, low-altitude drones can better support low-altitude security and flight operation. Drone defense and detection have become a basic security measure for airports and energy and chemical plants as well as large-scale events and will create an industrial space of tens of billions of CNY in China in the next few years. 5G integrated sensing and communications will emerge as a new technology that will enable industry users to solve many of the current technical problems. This will push industry partners to actively participate in industry innovation and accelerate the construction of an industry ecosystem.

Leading transportation has been prioritized as a major national strategy in China as it aims to achieve wide V2X coverage by 2025. Implementing precise road sensing as the foundation, however, still faces many challenges with respect to spectrum, performance, and cost in the deployment of sensing facilities. 5G networks are built with sensing capabilities, which improves the sensing performance and simplifies the deployment of roadside facilities, accelerating the development of smart transportation. We hope all parties in the industry will work with us to build an industry model and explore new ways to develop smart transportation.

Gan Bin, Vice President of Huawei Wireless Product Line, said smart super sensing — the most imaginative approach toward 5.5G — integrates sensing and communications to introduce new sensing capabilities into traditional wireless communications networks. It supports the reconstruction and convergence of the physical world with the digital world and enables metaverse and intelligent connection of everything. Huawei will continue to work with industry partners to explore new scenarios and define new requirements to accelerate the development of the smart super sensing industry.

To achieve this goal, China Unicom and Huawei have taken a step in scenarios like drone track detection and road sensing together with industry partners and will continue to explore wider application scenarios.