Telecom network vendor Huawei and NTT DOCOMO have conducted field trial of 5G radio access technologies in an outdoor test site in Chengdu, China.

Huawei streamed live video of trial activity to its booth at the CEATEC JAPAN 2015 trade show at Makuhari Messe in Chiba.

This, according to Huawei, is the first large-scale Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology test, with a concurrent connectivity of 24 user devices in the macro-cell environment on the sub-6GHz frequency band.

The 5G trial is also the first time to validate the performance of Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM) in the field.

The cell average downlink throughput of MU-MIMOs is 1.34Gbps and 3.6Gbps on download peak throughput in a 100MHz ultra-wide band channel are more than 10 times faster than single layer Single User MIMO (SU-MIMO) technology.

“As the first in the world to succeed with such a large multi-user environment test, this is an important milestone,” said Takehiro Nakamura, vice president and managing director of NTT DOCOMO’s 5G Laboratory.

Huawei and DOCOMO are conducting current field trials at a dedicated test site in Chengdu that enables both companies to systematically verify these technologies, including MU-MIMO, F-OFDM and SCMA.

“This joint field trial represents a significant advance toward fulfilling Huawei’s commitment to developing 5G technology standards before 2018,” said Wen Tong, CTO of Huawei Wireless Networks.

Huawei plans to launch the first 5G pilot networks with its partners in 2018, and aims to contribute to the 5G industry ecosystem to complete interoperability testing in 2019, and commercially launch 5G networks in 2020.

At CEATEC Japan, Huawei is also showcasing the world’s first 5G SU-MIMO prototype operating on 200MHz bandwidth of sub-6 GHz spectrum with a peak rate reaching 10Gps.

Baburajan K
[email protected]