AUSTIN, Texas – Steady gains are being made on the road to 5G, with partnerships between major players key to the development process.
At this year’s NIWeek, two of National Instruments’ biggest partners, Samsung and Nokia, talked about the gains they are making on the move toward the next generation of wireless technology.
NI’s director of wireless software-defined radio and 5G talks about the partnerships in the video below.
Samsung gave the first public demonstration of a fully dimensional multiple-input, multiple-output base station prototype designed to serve multiple users. The demo used four of National Instruments’ USRP RIO software receivers that emulated four “5G” handheld terminals.
The Korean device maker was able demonstrate how the antennas boosted the base station output from 2 megabits per second to 25 Mbps with the help of Samsung’s new 3D beam-forming algorithms.
The director of wireless software-defined radio and 5G at NI, James Kimery, said the companies had to get creative with their equipment.
“Not surprising, it was very difficult to find off-the-shelf equipment that could do everything they needed,” Kimery said. “They needed some customization because FD MIMO is new … with the NI platform they could do it specifically the USRP RIO, LabVIEW communications.”
Gary Xu, Samsung’s director of the wireless communications lab in Richardson, Texas, demonstrated the technology and said the antenna design benefits from the large number of DSP slices available in the Virtex-7 FPGA as well as the large number of high-speed SerDes transceivers, which drive the 32 antennas in the MIMO array through 32 high-speed DACs.
Nokia was also a big player in this year’s 5G discussion. At Wednesday’s keynote, Amitava Ghosh, head of North America radio systems research at Nokia talked about the company’s advancements in the 5G space.
“We are exploring flexible physical layer interface across all frequency bands,” Ghosh said, “5G architecture, massive MIMO, IoT, which is specifically focused on LTE-M, license-assisted access to name a few.”
He also talked about the company’s focus on millimeter wave for both backhaul and access technology. Ghosh believes the high-band spectrum associated with millimeter wave bands will be crucial to the success of 5G.
“To me, (to achieve) the 10,000x or 20,000x improvement in capacity, we need to explore (spectrum above) 6 GHz,” he explained. “We are focusing … on sub-6 GHz, centimeter wave and millimeter.”
But he admits there are difficulties in making millimeter wave a viable option.
“The challenges are penetration loss, how to overcome diffraction loss … how to design efficient beam tracking algorithms, how to make efficient use of RFIC so that you have a cost-competitive RFIC design to name a few,” Ghosh explained, but added he thinks Nokia’s new beam-steering algorithm helps address these issues.
Kimery said it is key that Nokia was able to use equipment from previous tests to achieve results so quickly. “Nokia didn’t have to rewrite everything from scratch, they started from the initial prototype from last year and then they were just able to extend it and they had a high amount of re-use. You can’t build a system like that unless you have a high amount of re-use, both in hardware and software.”
Kimery said he believes Samsung and Nokia are both on the cutting edge of 5G technology and will be major players as the standards continue to develop.
“In terms of the 5G research vectors and who’s winning, I think that both Samsung and Nokia are in a pretty strong position because they are actively demonstrating these 5G technologies that may or may not appear in the standard, but well ahead of some of their competition,” Kimery said.
