HONG KONG, Feb. 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- At Mobile World
Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2019,
China Mobile (CMCC) and its partners jointly showcased the
latest O-RAN research, such as a 4G/5G dual-mode, indoor pico-cell
solution based on the O-RAN cloudification and white-box design,
AI-driven load balancing, and quality assurance of
virtual-reality(VR) services.
Partnering with Lenovo, Intel, and Baicells, CMCC introduced the
world's first cloudified indoor pico-cell solution with 4G/5G
dual-mode support. The solution builds upon open hardware reference
design and commercial off-the-shelf IT equipment. It also features
carrier-grade cloud platform software and technologies that enable
full decoupling of the hardware and software. The open reference
design enables unified hardware selection and facilitates scaling
benefits for the hardware industry. The cloud and virtualization
technologies enable better handling of tidal effects and more
efficient resource utilization. As a result, this solution can
achieve 4G and 5G indoor coverage at a much lower cost.
Collaborating with Nokia, CMCC demonstrated its quality
assurance solution for VR services based on the O-RAN architecture.
The solution performs real-time traffic classification and
prediction of key quality metrics, and based on which, achieves
dynamic assurance of service quality and optimization of resource
allocation. Services such as VR are posing increasingly higher
requirements on mobile networks. This solution enables significant
improvement of user experience.
Jointly with ZTE, CMCC also showcased its AI-powered load
balancing solution based on the O-RAN architecture. The solution
achieves optimal load balancing via dynamic prediction of usage
patterns of end-user devices. This result is of significant
importance for guiding operators' network planning for scenarios
such as 4G/5G heterogeneous networks. In addition, the two
companies signed a MoU during the event to strengthen collaboration
in areas such as O-RAN network architecture, interfaces and
application scenarios, and ultimately building an open RAN
intelligent controller(RIC) platform. The two companies will also
jointly promote research and deployment of AI and big data
technologies in wireless networks.
CMCC is an active and strong proponent of O-RAN. As one of the
founding members of the O-RAN Alliance, CMCC is co-chair of its
Technical Steering Committee(TSC) and five out of the eight working
groups. CMCC has been leading definition of the overall O-RAN
architecture, intelligent and cloud-based wireless networks, and
open hardware reference designs, and establishment of the O-RAN
open-source community. In the Alliance's recent Madrid meeting, CMCC was instrumental in
finalizing key use cases for the RIC and core design principles for
a 5G+AI open architecture, and leading to consensus on industry
joint-force for open source and open reference designs.
While leading global collaboration on O-RAN standardization,
CMCC has been actively carrying out O-RAN trials in its production
networks. In Suzhou, Jiangsu
Province, it completed deployment and testing of industry's
first 4G cloudified indoor pico-cell solution. Initial results
verified commercial feasibility of the solution and indicated that
baseband pooling and MEC co-deployment could lead to better network
coverage at lower costs and higher service quality. The O-RAN-based
VR quality assurance and load balancing solutions have also been
deployed and tested in CMCC's Shanghai 5G experimental networks and Xi'an
Labs. Results show that open wireless network architecture,
combined with AI, enables finer control of on-demand wireless
resource allocation and new potential business models for the
operators.
In the 5G era, operators will face a variety of challenges, such
as increasingly higher network complexity and service diversity.
Mobile wireless networks are in critical need for new technologies,
such as AI and open architecture design, to improve efficiency of
operations and maintenance, and quality of user experience. CMCC is
fully committed to building next-generation, open, and smart
wireless networks.