If we say the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona sets several new trends every year, "5G Innovation and Acceleration" is undoubtedly the theme of MWC 2016. On the second day of this MWC, China's 5G innovation brought it to a climax. ZTE won the Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough award and the Outstanding Overall Mobile Technology - the CTO's Choice 2016 award for its Pre5G Massive MIMO technology, attracting global attention.
The MWC organized by the GSM Association (GSMA) is the world's most influential gathering in the mobile communications industry, and the GSMA's Global Mobile Awards represent the highest honor in this industry, known as the "Oscar of the Communications Industry." What is noteworthy, the technology winning the CTO's Choice award is selected from six special mobile award winners. The jury of this award consisted of the CTOs from sixteen operators around the world, who attached great importance to unique innovation, as well as customer experience improvement, and cost reduction, namely, enhancing operators' business value through innovation. ZTE was the only Chinese company winning this award.
Actually, this is the first time that GSMA awarded the greatest award and unanimous recognition from the CTOs to a technology in the 5G field. These two awards not only help ZTE achieve the leading position in the wireless broadband field, but also indicate that China's technological innovation has gained global recognition from 3G attempts and 4G proactiveness to 5G pioneering.
Key to Disruptive Innovation
The GSMA award jury gave the comment that the Pre5G Massive MIMO technology is a disruptive innovation during the evolution of mobile broadband. From the technical perspective, the Pre5G Massive MIMO technology supports dynamic beamforming for up to 12 to 16 data streams through 128 array elements, and rapidly multiplies spectral efficiency without changing air interfaces or terminals or increasing frequency points, providing three-dimensional super coverage. In addition, the Pre5G technology compatible with 4G terminals can be easily introduced to existing networks.
These are the keys to the partnerships established by many international operators with ZTE in building Pre5G pilot sites. Mr. Xiang Jiying, chief scientist of ZTE, further explained that these two awards indicated the universal recognition from the jury of the Pre5G technology, which is implemented through superb and complex mathematical methods.
For example, if several phones that are stacked up share the same frequency band and transmit signals within a space simultaneously, the signals will definitely interfere with each other. After the Pre5G Massive MIMO technology is used, each of these phones can reach its theoretical peak rate without interfering with each other. It sounds incredible. Actually, Pre5G does not operate in the traditional three-dimensional matrix, but in the matrix in dozens of and even hundreds of dimensions. In addition, Pre5G does not operate in the field of real numbers but in that of complex numbers.
It seems to be impossible to differentiate multiple targets in the traditional three-dimensional field of real numbers. However, this becomes easier in a 64-dimensional field of complex numbers. This superb and complex mathematical method of 5G has been implemented by ZTE five years in advance in the 4G era. This is attributed to the highly integrated "vector processing chip" independently developed by ZTE. Thanks to this series of technological innovations, Pre5G has achieved exponential increase in capacity.
Although Pre5G is implemented on 4G terminals, its spectral efficiency has been quite close to the target value of 5G. It is to some extent more difficult than the real 5G to achieve this goal without changing terminals. No breakthrough has been made in this technology in quite a long period. Therefore, ZTE will immediately attract widespread attention and establish partnerships worldwide once it achieves this goal.
ZTE will also make every endeavor in multi-carrier, stream improvement, inter-station collaboration, and other fields, aiming to further boost the performance of Pre5G products.
Global Deployment around the Corner
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held earlier this year, Pre5G also marked a climax of future networks. At that time, ZTE announced that the Pre5G technology would be commercially available in at least 10 countries and regions in 2016, including mainland China and some other countries in Asia and Europe. To achieve this goal, ZTE plans to complete field tests in all provinces in China by mid-2016.
The time for commercial use of depends on two critical factors: market demands, and technical strength of the industry chain.
With the explosive growth of mobile traffic, operators have realized that the application of new technologies will no longer be restricted by a lack of sophisticated standards. At least, 4G development has fully indicated that it is critical to apply sophisticated technologies on existing networks to solve urgent demands, to enhance network performance and improve user experience as soon as possible.
Both terminal users and the current network situation have presented real demands for 4G+ and 5G. Especially for operators, after mobile broadband has entered the post-4G era, compared with building new 5G networks, it is clearly more practical to increase wireless spectrum efficiency exponentially, enhance network coverage and system capacity, and achieve much higher speed and capacity than 4G networks on existing sites and spectrum resources by using the Massive MIMO technology.
These two GSMA awards have reflected the extraordinary strength of ZTE, as well as the outstanding efforts made by Chinese enterprises to evolve from participants to pioneers in the international ICT market. Zhang Jianguo, vice president of ZTE, delivered the acceptance speech, "We should give over 30,000 R&D engineers worldwide the thumbs up. These two awards have proved that ZTE has become a technological innovator that can create real value for international customers, whether in Pre5G or overall solutions."
Innovation means heavy investment in manpower and financial resources. Statistics shows that ZTE invested a special fund of 200 million Yuan in 2014 and over 100 million Euros in 2015 in 5G R&D. In addition, ZTE has signed memorandums of understanding for strategic cooperation with China Mobile, SoftBank Japan, Korea Telecom, U Mobile Malaysia, and many other operators to jointly launch experimental verification, technical evaluation, and research and development of 5G-related technologies.
During this MWC, ZTE and Hutchison Drei Austria signed a memorandum of understanding on Pre5G Massive MIMO to build the first Pre5G pilot site in Europe, which further accelerates the global pilot projects and large-scale commercial use of Pre5G in 2016.