Huawei has claimed the world’s first successful large-scale field trial of 5G new radio access technologies, in cooperation with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest mobile network operator by subscribers. The two companies announced their partnership on joint trials of the new air-interface technologies for 5G in March 2015. The field trial, which took place at an outdoor test site at Chengdu in China, represents the first large-scale Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology test with a concurrent connectivity of 24 user devices in the macro-cell environment on the sub-6GHz frequency band. Huawei claims it is also the first time to validate the performance of Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM) in the field, both of which are 5G new air interface technologies proposed by Huawei.
‘This joint field trial represents a significant advance toward fulfilling Huawei’s commitment to developing 5G technology standards before 2018,’ commented Dr. Wen Tong, CTO of Huawei Wireless Networks, adding: ‘Results like these show we are making rapid progress and are on the right path. I am confident that what we have learned here will be reflected in even more innovative technological advances as we continue working on 5G research.’ Huawei plans to launch the first 5G pilot networks with its partners in 2018, and aims to contribute to the 5G industry ecosystem to complete interoperability testing in 2019, before commercially launching 5G networks in 2020.