China firm bid to keep fans ‘supercharged’

Article posted by Coliseum, July 8^th, 2021

Image: Huawei

China Mobile Zhejiang recently ran a pilot 5G network at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center (China). Running on Huawei’s leading products and solutions, the network utilized 2.6 GHz and 4.9 GHz bands to provide 5G coverage in enclosed ultra-dense areas. In addition, 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) was an outstanding highlight of the network.

‘Huawei’ stated that the verification test utilized more than 400 5G devices to perform stress tests with multiple networking solutions involving intra-frequency, staggered-frequency, inter-frequency, and distributed massive MIMO. In this whole process, the cells were under extreme capacity levels and 5G user behavior was also simulated to assess the performance of capacity increase, interference mitigation and network redundancy.

China Mobile Group Zhejiang Company Limited provides mobile communication services. The company supplies voice, data, messages, Wi-Fi network service, as well as customer service. China Mobile Group Zhejiang also offers mobile music, paper, reading, video, and market services.

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The Hangzhou Sports Park Stadium or Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center is a multiuse stadium in Hangzhou, China. It was completed in 2018 and it is used mostly for soccer matches. The stadium was designed with a capacity to hold 80,000 spectators.

Huawei Technologies Company Limited is a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong (China). It designs, develops and sells telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics. The company was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former Deputy Regimental Chief in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Massive MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) uses multiuser spatial division to form separate narrow beam coverage in a given space for different users.

‘Huawei’ further stated that the test results showed that the uplink capacity was 50 percent greater than that obtained with cell splitting and the downlink and uplink interference is efficiently curbed. This level of performance suffices to fulfill the tremendous service requirements for messaging, Internet access, video transfer, and broadcasting with good user experience. This will be essential for network assurance in the smart stadiums for the 2022 Asian Games.

The 2022 Asian Games, also known as XIX Asiad, will be a multisport event to be held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China from September 10^th to September 25^th, 2022. Hangzhou will be the third Chinese City to host the Asian Games, after Beijing in 1990 and Guangzhou in 2010.

The opening and closing ceremonies of the 2022 Asian Games is scheduled to take place at the iconic lotus-petal modeled Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center. China Mobile is the official partner for communication services at this event.

And, as a part of the network assurance efforts, China Mobile’s provincial branch of Zhejiang established a work team with Huawei to explore new bands, products, solutions, features, and approaches to increase capacity and resolve strong interference in ultra-dense indoor areas. There will be a large number of 5G users and diverse services occurring during the Games. With this objective in mind, the work team serves to work out solutions that can increase network capacity while minimizing the rate loss arising from interference between cells. A balance between 5G capacity and service experience is essential to enable dedicated smart services by improving both user-perceived rate and network capacity. It will also prove helpful when building 5G networks in other dense scenarios as an experience in delivering superior user experience.

After thoroughly surveying the site and studying solutions, China Mobile Zhejiang adopted 2.6 GHz + 4.9 GHz dual-band networking for the project. The 4.9 GHz band was used to deploy the capacity layer on which Huawei’s indoor distributed Massive MIMO was deployed and 2:3 slot assignments was configured. This combination enabled a single cell to provide an uplink rate of 1.2 Gbps. In addition, 16×16 ultra-narrow precise beamforming (signal processing technique) was implemented by leveraging the high-performance antennas to efficiently isolate interference. Tests in the grandstand areas on both Floors 2 and 3 of the stadium showed that indoor distributed Massive MIMO could eliminate interference between cells, helping to increase the uplink capacity by 50 percent over 4T4R cells.

Indoor distributed Massive MIMO opens up a new direction for exploring just how big indoor 5G networks can evolve. Incorporating the leading technologies of outdoor 5G Massive MIMO into indoor networks, distributed Massive MIMO provides indoor networks with joint beamforming and multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) to enhance both the 5G network capacity and user experience. It eliminates the co-channel interference to improve signal quality on multicell networks, providing a consistent high-speed, high-quality experience in most areas with 5G coverage.

China Mobile Zhejiang strives to build high-quality 5G networks to provide users with premium services and help the City of Hangzhou host Asia Games while supercharging it with smart services. Indoor distributed Massive MIMO will be the ideal option for large venues with a large number of 5G mobile users who are looking for a smarter spectating experience. It will play a crucial role in making the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center stand out as a benchmark for smart stadia across China and beyond.

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