LIGHT-Net: China Unicom's mobile service booster

Another presentation from the Small Cells Word Summit 2016. China Unicom refers to LIGHT-Net. The definition of LIGHT-Net can be seen above but based on the translation of the press release here, LIGHT-Net stands for LTE Technology Innovation and Network Evolution Solutions. Continuing from the press release:

Experts said, LIGHT-Net will have five characteristics: First, the asset-light (the Low-cost) , the software-defined (SDN) to achieve a flexible network, reducing CAPEX and OPEX ; followed by intelligence (the Intelligent) , will enable the network automatic planning, optimization and automatic interference avoidance; third is green (green) , to achieve low power consumption, low radiation, low noise; fourth is efficient (High-efficiency) , improve resource scheduling capabilities and spectrum utilization efficiency; the fifth is close (Tight) , to achieve macro-micro coordination and heterogeneous integration.
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Overall, LIGHT-Net research program can be divided into three steps. The first stage, based on the interference coordination LIGHT-Net microsite deployment: the introduction of micro-station deployment, absorbing macro hotspot network data traffic; the introduction of interference coordination technology to solve interference problems caused by increased cell. The second phase, enhanced collaboration processing, macro and micro interoperability: Promoting co-processing technology macro and micro cells, pico cells between the cell edge coverage to enhance performance and user access experience. The third stage, an access integration, multi-stream merge: the ideal backhaul carrier aggregation, non-ideal backhaul dual link technology between macro and micro HSAP / LTE -system multi-stream merger.

I think the small cells maybe Huawei's lampsite as I had mentioned earlier.

Anyway, the presentation is embedded below. As usual, if you have more details, please add as comments below.

Case study of WLAN and Small Cells by China Unicom

China is a huge and most populated country. Many people do not realise that the number of mobiles in China is more than combined USA and Europe. There are challenges that come along with this huge subscriber base. That is why its not enough to have just cellular connectivity. Small cells and WiFi has a big role to play. A news article last year boldly stated that 'Wi-Fi to be new battleground in China's internet sector'.

According to this article by ThinkSmallCell last year, China Unicom is the second largest operator in China with 251 million subscribers and $21 Billion in revenues. They have only 40MHz available for 4G cellular as compared to 130MHz for the leader China Mobile.

This presentation from Small Cells World Summit 2014 is a good case study of how China Unicom is working on deploying Wi-Fi hotspots and Small cells to meet their customers needs. The complete presentation is below and available from Slideshare.

Progress on WLAN and Small Cellin China Unicom from Zahid Ghadialy

Huawei's Lampsite

Huawei unveiled its 'Lampsite' for 'Deep Indoor Coverage' back in 2013. This is what they announced then:

LampSite includes a comprehensive set of BBU, RemoteHUB(rHUB) and PicoRRU(pRRU) products along with accompanying transmission solutions. The compact pRRU supports multiple bands and modes and can simultaneously support LTE TDD, LTE FDD, UMTS and GSM. A LampSite indoor coverage network can also be deployed simultaneously with Huawei’s SingleRAN solution. 

Thanks to BBU’s baseband sharing feature, one fiber is used for several cells, saving up to 87% of fiber typically used for indoor deployments. rHUB connects to pRRU by cable, and support power over Ethernet (PoE) to simplify site construction and reduce total deployment costs. 

In an early deployment phase, individual pRRU cells aggregate into one cell to reduce interference. Once the network offloads heavy traffic, the cells are split again and Adaptive SFN is enabled to balance capacity and interference. Huawei iManager system and evaluation tools are then used to accurately monitor and intelligently optimize indoor hotspot traffic.

This innovative solution has not only helped them to win contracts with China Unicom, TDC Denmark and Telenor Norway but according to TMN magazine article, "Huawei is shipping more than 10,000 PRRUs (Pico Remote Radio Units) per month in some countries and regions for its LampSite in-building system, according to Peter Zhou, Huawei's President of Small Cell & WiFi, Wireless Network."

Recently Huawei and Telenor also won an award in the LTE World Summit for "Innovation in HetNet Development". With Huawei’s LampSite, Telenor is able to provide average downlink throughput of 46Mbps at any location in a building and significantly cut costs. Deployment of each pico Remote Radio Unit takes only three hours – from site survey, through installation, commissioning, to going live, ensuring rapid rollout in areas with weak signal penetration.

Based on presentations in different events, looks like Huawei is not complacent with its achievements. It plans to develop the next generation or NG Lampsite to achieve 1Gbps Indoor throughput with whole lot of technologies to help achieve this. Multi-stream Aggregation (MSA) being the key. See my earlier post on MSA on the 3G4G blog here.


Related Posts:

• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Huawei Lampsite 3.0
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Small Cells and Neutral Host Networks
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Huawei SkySite: Drone with 5G base station & '5G Book' RRU