Skip to main content

Super Uplink to improve 5G Coverage and Speeds

One of the challenges with 5G that many people must have noticed are the poor uplink speeds, especially on the cell edge. While using mid/high-band TDD, these poor uplink characteristics result is a smaller cell size as compared to that of low bands or even 3G/4G. 

This is where Huawei's innovation comes in play. Huawei White Paper on Innovation and Intellectual Property details this as follows:

With the growing adoption of 5G in B2B domains, networks need to offer faster uplink speeds and lower latency without compromising downlink speeds. Huawei has come up with a series of solutions to increase uplink coverage and bandwidth. Our two vital technologies – Uplink & Downlink Decoupling, and Super Uplink – have been accepted by 3GPP as part of the Release 15 and Release 16 specifications for global 5G networks, respectively.

  • Uplink & Downlink Decoupling: Adds low frequency bands for uplink transmission in areas that lack uplink coverage in 3.5 GHz bands. Uses high frequency bands to carry 5G downlink services, and uses low frequency bands to carry 5G uplink services to increase 5G uplink coverage.
  • Super Uplink: Features TDD/FDD coordination, high-band/lowband complementation, and time/frequency domain aggregation. It boosts uplink bandwidth and coverage and greatly reduces latency. As the industry's first time/frequency domain aggregation of TDD and FDD in the uplink frequency band, Super Uplink is a groundbreaking innovation in wireless communications. With its excellent speed and latency, Super Uplink is an optimal solution for both B2B and B2C markets

In a recent press release, China Unicom Beijing and Huawei jointly deployed Super Uplink at more than 1,000 commercial sites in Beijing as part of their joint 5G Capital project established in April 2020. The announcement said:

China Unicom Beijing tested 5G Super Uplink on its commercial networks in 2020. It then went on to deploy the technology at a smaller scale in May 2021. The results show great improvements in network performance, with an increase of 10% to 40% in the overall uplink rate of Super Uplink users and a three-fold increase in the uplink rate of cell edge users. To give more of its users access to such network capabilities and improve the uplink experience across its network, China Unicom Beijing deployed 5G Super Uplink networks in multiple high-density areas, over more than 1,000 sites, across five days in July 2021.

5G Super Uplink was a core innovative step in the 5G Capital project, and is projected to help China Unicom Beijing build high-quality 5G networks. 5G Super Uplink significantly improves uplink capabilities by using TDD 3.5 GHz and FDD 2.1 GHz coordination, high- and low-band complementation, time- and frequency-domain aggregation, and millisecond-level resource scheduling, meeting the high requirements of services such as short video upload and HD live broadcast.

Surprisingly, it wasn't easy to find a nice picture explaining the solution. The image on top is from a presentation here and was the only one we could find with a clear enough explanation. The video explains the working with an example.

Ericsson on the other hand uses Carrier Aggregation based approach to solve the coverage and speeds issue as can be seen in the tweet below.

As we discussed in our blog post yesterday, Qualcomm is demoing Sub-band Half Duplex (SBHD) as a way to improve uplink reliability and speed on the cell edge.

Related Posts: 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Laser Inter-Satellite Links (LISLs) in a Starlink Constellation

When we first talked about Starlink back in 2019 , we saw in the video that the concept involved laser communication to communicate between the satellites. While the initially launched satellites did not have the laser communication mechanism built in, it looks like they are being added to the newer ones.  A report from Fast Company in late 2021 said: One of the next big upgrades in telecom will involve satellites firing lasers at each other—to beam data, not blow stuff up. The upside of replacing traditional radio-frequency communication with lasers, that encode data as pulses of light, can be much like that of deploying fiber-optic cable for terrestrial broadband: much faster speeds and much lower latency. “Laser links in orbit can reduce long-distance latency by as much as 50%, due to higher speed of light in vacuum & shorter path than undersea fiber,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted in July about the upgrade now beginning for that firm’s Starlink satellite constellation. The
1 comment
Read more

CSI-RS vs SRS Beamforming

In an issue of Signals Flash by Signals Research Group (SRG), they talked about 2 different types of MIMO. Quoting from their journal, "CSI-RS versus SRS. Those operators that have tested or made token use of MU-MIMO leverage a flavor of MU-MIMO that is based on CSI-RS. The MU-MIMO network we tested was based on SRS, which makes it far more likely to observe sixteen spatial layers (versus eight)." I reached out to Emil Björnson, Visiting Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Associate Professor at Linköping University to see if he has explained this in any of his videos. Here is what he said: " I'm not talking about 3GPP terminology in any of my videos. But you can listen to the slides that starts around 12:40 in this video (embedded below) . If you are looking for CSI-RS vs SRS based MU-MIMO, then jump to around 12:40 in this video where you can see CSI-RS being referred to as "grid of beams" and SRS is similar to the other option, which is t
Post a Comment
Read more

IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability (UHR), a.k.a. Wi-Fi 8

Back in 2020 we looked at the introductory post of Wi-Fi 7 which was followed up by a more detailed post in Feb 2022. We are now following on with an introductory post on the next generation Wi-Fi.  A new paper on arXiv explores the journey towards IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability (UHR), the amendment that will form the basis of Wi-Fi 8. Quoting selected items from the paper  below: After providing an overview of the nearly completed Wi-Fi 7 standard, we present new use cases calling for further Wi-Fi evolution. We also outline current standardization, certification, and spectrum allocation activities, sharing updates from the newly formed UHR Study Group. We then introduce the disruptive new features envisioned for Wi-Fi 8 and discuss the associated research challenges. Among those, we focus on access point coordination and demonstrate that it could build upon 802.11be multi-link operation to make Ultra High Reliability a reality in Wi-Fi 8. The IEEE 802.11bn UHR: Whose Study Gro
Post a Comment
Read more