Huawei’s Mobile Broadband Forum in pictures

By Keith Dyer 28 November 2016

5G RAN products, NB-IoT trials, enhanced antenna technology and new indoor coverage launches all featured at Huawei's Mobile Broadband Forum

At Huawei’s Mobile Broadband Forum, held in Tokyo on Thursday and Friday of last week, the messaging from the networking giant was about moving from SingleRAN to the CloudRAN, harvesting capacity and IoT gains from 4.5G (LTE-A PRO) and preparing for 5G.

The company’s main launches were targeted at improvements to 4.5G – LampSite 3.0, antenna advances, WTTx – and at putting an architecture in place within which 5G-capable radio elements can be deployed later. This was all about enabling the CloudRAN, with the company sounding a big fanfare for its new Mobile Cloud Engine (MCE) architecture and the features that can be enabled from this distributed cloud presence.

The Mobile Network was there to snap the action on the event floor. Here’s a recap.

Sometimes it snows in... November? The first morning of HMBBF marked the first time for 54 years Tokyo had seen November snow.
"Mobile is The Future", we were told. Sub-message: "From SingleRAN to CloudRAN". Seems there was still some snow on the phone lens, here.
Here's Huawei's portrayal of how it will address 5G from the radio end. Note the likely bands remain veiled, but also that higher order MIMO doesn't get started until we hit higher bands - C-Band and upwards. This is not to say that such MIMO is impossible in lower bands. Indeed, at its MBBF, Huawei was proud of a demo of a 128 element array that SoftBank is testing in its live 2.6GHz network.
One thing that came out of the event is that Huawei is set to make a further push into the smart antenna market, where it has rapidly taken market share - it says now 30% - from a market previously dominated by the likes of Kathrein, CommScope (Andrew) and Amphenol. This active antenna unit includes 64T64R (transmit, receive) capability.
Here's another slide stating how Huawei wants to progress its antenna tech. You'll see that the antenna can support multiple bands (700/800/900/2100/2600 MHz) and also the HexaBeam 3D formation - with four beams on the outer and four inner - that can provide 18 sectorisation across three panels.
This grab of a slide shows the features that Hauwei says can be enabled from its Cloud Engine - the ability to provide spectrum aggregation across 4G, 5G and unlicensed bands, as well as the ability to decouple control and user plane, and also macro and micro layer connectivity for separate uplinke/downlink.
Every show needs a drone, and this UAV belongs to China Mobile to provide emergency cell coverage. A mini base station mounted on the bottom of the drone connects to a ground station (van) which in turn provides a satellite backhaul network. So the idea is in the event of an emergency you get the van as close to the trouble spot as possible, and then send the drone up to hover over the site in question - bringing cellphone coverage to rescue workers and others.
Here's the underside of that drone, with tiny base station payload.
This demo is one of which Huawei was pretty proud. It showed a concurrent connection to test user devices (Test UE) from a "5G" mmWave base station and a 4G base station, controlled by a "cloud-based" element.
This is the visual representation of the 5G and LTE dual connectivity set-up in the previous slide. Note the speeds they are achieving.
Here are the "foundational" steps for enhancing mobile broadband - not 5G, note. There's 4x4 MIMO for improving cell edge performance, there's 3D nultiplexing which raises average speeds, and there's a nod to two Huawei launches to improve indoor capacity and coverage: Its home wireless broadband product set called WTTx 2.0 and its LampSite 3.0 - the new version of its large in-building solution.
Here's the LampSite 3.0 product itself (or the access point part of it).
A rather nice model showing a potential use case for LampSite 3.0 - an indoor arena.
During the event there was a demo of an NB-IoT parking sensor operating in SoftBank's LTE network. When the car is parked over the sensor, a simple app on a phone showed the space as occupied. When the car rolled away, the app on the phone changed.
Here's a close up of the sensor, which is designed to be embedded or buried in the road itself.
Network Slicing is a key concept to enable the advanced sales of network capabilities to verticals. Here three slices are shown, with the enabling elements dropped into the corresponding location in the network. On the left you can see the F-OFDM and the frame structure involved, with much shorter TTIs for the smart metering use case enabling greater device density. For the smart driving slice the V2X server is placed in the edge cloud, while the AR/VR slice sees the caching taking place a hop back in the local data centre. Meanwhile the smart metering server is right back in the central data centre.
Here's a new capability Huawei was trumpeting as part of its "Cloudfication of the Air Interface" messaging. It's User-Centric MIMO, in which automatic logical Tx/Rx connections are made - sort of combining the spatial gain of 3D MIMO with the added capacity of Distributed MIMO.
Just as an side, almost, here's a slide showing the slow pace of VoLTE penetration in some major cities. You could, to be fair, probably choose cities that have higher penetrations but Huawei's point here was that service introduction is still a really slow burner (except in South Korea, naturally.
Mount Fuji peeps though the clouds to bid your correspondent farewell.