How can the three major carriers innovate their networks when they face the "4G 4G" challenge?

How can the three major carriers innovate their networks when they face the "4G 4G" challenge?

4G development in 2015 is about to enter the fourth quarter. At the latest "LTE Network Innovation Seminar" sponsored by the TD Industry Alliance, a group of the latest statistics published by the Secretary-General of the TD Alliance shows that, with the three major carriers working together to build 4G networks and accelerate 4G commercialization this year, more than 1.34 million 4G base stations have been built in China, half of the total number of 4G base stations that have been built in the same period. At the same time, the number of 4G users has exceeded 0.234 billion, of which 0.139 billion were added in the first half of this year.

This situation prompted the domestic 4g construction to enter the stage of evolution technology implementation, such as optimization in intensive network scenarios, commercialization of VoLTE, and carrier aggregation at a faster speed. In this forum, Peng xinxin, deputy director of China Electronics Science and Technology Seventh Research Institute, said that although 4G networks are becoming increasingly mature and 5G standards are also widely discussed in the industry, there are still many problems to be resolved and discussed, for example, how can we cope with the challenges of surge in data services and diversified needs based on limited bandwidth resources, how can LTEA and VoLTE be commercially available, and how can we deploy the LTE network in the construction for the development of 5g?

Undoubtedly, these problems are also the most important issues of the three major operators in the LTE network. Therefore, the three major carriers have also given their respective strategies.

 

China Mobile: four major strategies help achieve the "2020 +" goal

At this forum, Vice President Huang Yuhong of China Mobile Research Institute highlighted the development ideas of cross-border integration and entrepreneurial innovation. Since 2014, China Mobile began to accelerate its 4G development. In July this year, it officially released its "2020 +" technology vision. to this goal, China Mobile proposed several important network development directions.

First, the network evolved to "4G +". In the implementation process of fast fee reduction, the use of the carrier aggregation technology was increased. Based on this, 4G networks in multiple regions, including Guangdong Province, can reach a peak of 220 Mbit/s. In some pilot regions, the speed is even 300 Mbit/s. In addition, the terminal and chip industry chain has accelerated support for carrier aggregation technology.

Second, in the follow-up evolution of 4G networks, China Mobile proposed that 4g acceleration is not only an application of new technologies such as carrier aggregation, but also advance deployment in the 5G era, large-scale antennas and higher-order modulation methods are introduced to gradually improve network performance. Huang Yuhong stressed: "By the end of this year, China Mobile will provide commercially available VoLTE-based voice services, which will make LTE speech more high-quality and cost-effective, and give users a better experience, by the end of the year, each city will be commercially available on a regular basis. More than 20 VoLTE-supported mobile phones are available soon ."

The third is to use more advanced technologies to make the network itself greener and more software-oriented, and to prepare for network transformation.

The fourth is to use a large number of IT technologies, including SDN and NFV, to make the pipeline smarter, separate control and bearer, and realize the "4.0 era" of the network ".

Based on these objectives, China Mobile released its NovoNet network vision, used an innovative architecture to change network organizations, and used centralized control, flexible scheduling, and other methods to make operational methods innovative, the goal is to make the network more open and provide services on demand. "To this end, China Mobile is already working on technical preparations to build a NovoNet network in the direction of big data applications, and use big data to analyze and optimize its own network, in the future, we will be able to provide customized service models for users and make the network more efficient and open." Huang Yuhong explained.

China Telecom: 4G + Based on C/L multimode

Although China Mobile TD-LTE's first step to China Telecom's 4G development has brought a lot of pressure, but through the active cooperation in the industrial chain and China Telecom's internal reform, china Telecom is growing fast in 4G.

According to Yang fengyi, China Telecom's Deputy Chief Technical Innovation engineer, China Telecom currently has 0.46 million 4G base stations covering nearly 3 GB of coverage. The number of 4G base stations has exceeded 38 million, and sales of 4G terminals have increased explosively.

For "4G +", China Telecom has also introduced a series of strategies, including using multi-carrier technology to improve network speed on LTE Networks, and emphasizing the development of CDMA/LTE multimode on terminals. At the recent China Telecom Tianyi terminal exhibition, China Telecom also released 2016 ~ Plan for commercial use of VoLTE in 2017.

5G is also a key topic of China Telecom in R & D. Yang fengyi suggested that the industry should first address the key technical needs of the 5G platform. "With the introduction of NFV technology, we found that the new network platform can provide better performance and lower costs than the traditional platform in the past. The network performance is easier to optimize and the network structure is more flexible ."

In terms of network performance improvement, China Telecom is focusing on three major issues. The first is the main 4G frequency band based on China Telecom's 1800MHz and 2100MHz, which makes the 4G network more extensive and solves the interoperability problem between LTE and 3G networks, it does not rule out the possibility of introducing VoLTE in the MHz band.

The second is that China Telecom attaches great importance to BBU's application. Yang fengyi explained: "Although China Telecom has many optical fiber resources, its site resources are still limited. In the past, China Telecom paid great attention to the BBU architecture during the initial construction of 3G and 4G networks. At this stage, the most important strategy is to stack the BBU through physical concentration. Considering the collaboration trend in the future, we have already tested BBU's collaboration with China Telecom and will be 'clusterized 'in the future. However, in actual network construction and practice, there will be a more practical way to use BBU resources."

The third is the application of the carrier aggregation technology. China Telecom has announced the implementation of the carrier aggregation capability on FDD 1800MHz and 2100MHz resources. "China Telecom will conduct a three-carrier aggregation test next year, and will consider multiple methods of carrier aggregation ." Yang fengyi added.

China Unicom: addressing traffic and bandwidth challenges

China Unicom also needs to address the three major challenges of LTE integration under the goal of "reaching 0.5 million 4G base stations by the end of the year. Ma hongbing, Chief Expert of the China Unicom Research Institute, concluded that the first challenge was that the popularity of smart terminals accounted for more than 60% of all users' video businesses, this puts great demands on the support capability of network traffic. The second challenge is the unbalanced network load. about 30% of the base stations on the entire network absorb more than 80% of the service data on the entire network, these 30% base stations have high configuration and capability requirements. The third challenge is misplacement of network configurations, cross-generation systems, differentiated services, and cross-generation terminals, as a result, if you want to enjoy a faster network service, you must replace the terminal. "At the same time, with the development of the user scale, the interference between different operators in the system and between systems is very obvious, including the coexistence of outdoor stations and multiple networks, they all face major interference problems."

In this regard, China Unicom also proposed a response strategy: to expand the spectrum resources, and to aggregate scattered spectrum through the carrier aggregation technology; to improve the spectrum efficiency, introduce multiple antennas and other technologies, and increase the sharing of resource pools; based on Multi-Point collaboration, interference is reduced, and macro-micro collaboration is developed. Dynamic Spectrum sharing between operators and operators is promoted to create a LIGHT-Net network, which reduces costs and improves equipment utilization and spectrum efficiency, implement a more closely connected networking architecture.