The trial, which took place in Yokohama, paves the way for applications and deployment of 5G millimeter wave, according to Huawei
Chinese vendor Huawei and Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo have completed a joint field trial for 5G mobile communications over a long distance with 39 GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) band in Yokohama, Japan.
During the 5G trial, the downlink data transmissions were achieved at a maximum speed of more than 2 Gbps on a testing vehicle which was equipped with a user equipment equivalent to a mobile phone.
The vendor said this successful trial paves the way for applications and deployments of 5G mmWave. Long-distance mobility transmission over 5G mmWave is one of the enabling technologies to realize 5G enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and ubiquitous connectivity of massive data rate, Huawei said.
“Long-distance transmission over 39GHz mmWave will enable 5G network deployments in a large scale. It opens up the new stage of the 39GHz mmWave technology and will deliver the ultra-fast experience with 5G high data speed,” said Takehiro Nakamura, vice president and managing director of 5G Laboratory at NTT DoCoMo.
“The 5G mmWave technology will help our customer to reuse the existing network infrastructure, especially for sites resource, to protect their investment. This test is first time successfully to verify the long distance transmission of 5G mmWave,” said Wen Tong, the CTO of Huawei Wireless Networks.
The Asian vendor also highlighted that achieving wide area coverage and mobility performance on 5G mmWave is still a technological challenge for 5G industry. High propagation loss of mmWave signals limit its coverage, while narrow directional beam required to focus the transmission power makes the mmWave beam to track the mobile device becomes more difficult, Huawei said.
The joint field trial conduced in November 2017, demonstrated that 39GHz mmWave can be used for the long distance transmission in both stationary and mobility scenarios even in urban complex deployment environments. The partners recorded over 3 Gbps downlink throughput on the stationary user equipment (UE) at a distance of 1.5 km and over 2 Gbps at a distance of 1.8 km on 39GHz mmWave.
Huawei and NTT DoCoMo have been working on 5G field trials since December 2014.
Earlier this month, the two companies have successfully completed high speed data transmission over a distance of 1.2km on the 28GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum.
The field trial at Tokyo Skytree, in downtown Tokyo, achieved more than a 4.52Gbps downlink throughput and a 1.55Gbps uplink throughput with a coverage range of 1.2km.
For this 5G trial, Huawei supplied one of its 5G base stations which supports Massive MIMO and beamforming technologies as well as the 5G core network and 5G mmWave test user equipment used in the tests.
In November 2016, Huawei and NTT DoCoMo carried out a large-scale field trial using 200 megahertz of spectrum in the 4.5 GHz band in Yokohama, Japan. During the trial, the companies said they witnessed network speeds up to 11.29 Gbps total and less than half-a-millisecond latency. Earlier this year, the telco kicked off a 5G trial in Japan’s capital Tokyo.
Earlier this year, Nakamura had announced plans to launch 5G trials in Tokyo during this year. The executive said that the Odaiba waterfront area is set to include trials of 5G coverage and connected cars, while the Tokyo Skytree Town location is to include outdoor and indoor coverage tests.
