BARCELONA, Spain--Huawei is showcasing its new 5G air-interface technology here at Mobile World Congress and the vendor plans to boost its 5G research and patent portfolio.
The company has now announced successful testing and validity of its conceptual prototyping. The results of the test, according to Huawei, prove that its new air interface design can improve spectral efficiency, increase connectivity and reduce latency. This will facilitate the deployment of high bandwidth applications such as virtual reality and customized scenarios applied to the Internet of Things (IoT).
5G technology is a hot topic this year at MWC because of its implications on already highly trafficked 4G networks and high demand applications as well as increasing appetite for mobile internet overall. Huawei has said it plans to spend $600 million on 5G wireless research and development from 2013 to 2018.
"We have made quite a large number of technology innovations and breakthroughs," Ken Hu, deputy chairman and rotating CEO of Huawei, told reporters here, according to Reuters. As a result, Huawei has a stronger position in terms of patents, he said.
In order to fully develop and deploy this technology, however, many believe that a new air interface, networking and network architecture must be designed and deployed and of all elements needed to architect such an infrastructure, the air interface is the most fundamental.
Highlighted in the new air interface techniques proposed by Huawei are its non-orthogonal access technology based on Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA), and Filtered-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (F-OFDM).
SCMA allows a wide variety and huge amount of data to be effectively transmitted via tones. F-OFDM is a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies. A large number of closely spaced signals are used to carry data on several parallel streams or channels.
OFDM is a method of digital modulation where the signal is split into several narrowband channels at different frequencies. It is used now in 4G mobile communications, powerline networks, DSL internet access and digital television and audio broadcasting. The technology however, was conceived in the 1960s and 70s during research into minimizing interference among similar frequency channels.
For more
- see Huawei's 5G air interface announcement
- see this Wireless Mag article
- see this Reuters article
- see this GSMA Intelligence report
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