Huawei has unveiled a mobile spectrum management solution that could open up new possibilities for the dynamic and efficient sharing of valuable capacity.
During a presentation at the company's Mobile Broadband Forum event near Tokyo, Edward Deng, president of Huawei's Wireless Solution division, presented CloudAIR, which the vendor is pushing as the third leg of its mobile cloud stool.
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has previously launched its CloudEdge system (for the mobile network core) and CloudRAN (for the radio access network), both of which center around the ability to unshackle and share network resources. CloudEdge is already commercially available and deployed in multiple networks while CloudRAN was launched earlier this year, is currently in proof of concept (PoC) mode and is set to become commercially available during the third quarter of 2017.
CloudAIR is focused on ways in which spectrum, channels and power can become shared resources within a mobile network, though whether simply allowing resources to be shared means it can be pinned with the "cloud" badge is debatable.
the concept is certainly in line with future roadmaps already being discussed within the mobile operator community. "The CloudAIR pitch has some of the same ideas around resource management as the X-RAN initiative launched at the NGMN conference last month."
One of the main challenges for introducing spectrum-sharing capabilities as proposed by Huawei, though, is that it goes against the industry trend of deploying multi-vendor networks that don't tie an operator to a single supplier. "The spectrum sharing approach looked very interesting as a way for operators to manage spectrum holdings and migrate subscribers across different technology generations," notes Brown. However, "it requires a single-vendor network, so it won't suit everyone, but it's interesting nevertheless."