Huawei and NTT DOCOMO Achieve a New Breakthrough in 5G

Huawei and NTT DOCOMO have completed a successful joint field trial for 5G mobile communications over a long distance with 39 GHz Millimeter Wave (mmWave) band in Yokohama, one of largest commercial areas in Japan.

In this trial, the downlink data transmissions were achieved at a maximum speed over 2 Gbps on a testing vehicle which was equipped with a user equipment equivalent to a mobile phone, while driving at speeds over 20 km per hour. This successful trial result opens up new door 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 whilst fully leveraging the current macro-cellular sites investment by operators.

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. The joint field trial conduced in November, successfully 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. The trial have validated and proved the effectiveness of two companies’ mmWave technologies to provide range of 5G services which requres wide area coverage.

Huawei and DOCOMO jointly worked on the 5G innovation and successfully conducted a series of large-scale field trials since December 2014. Currently, the developments of 5G have been in the new era, which the first version of 3GPP 5G standard of Release-15 will be completed in 2018, the industry is entering the 5G Pre-commercial stage.