Showing posts with label Vendor Samsung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vendor Samsung. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 December 2024

How Samsung is Leveraging vRAN to Match Traditional RAN (T-RAN) Performance

As mobile networks evolve, virtualized RAN (vRAN) and Open RAN architectures are gaining traction. Even operators who were initially sceptical are increasingly exploring and deploying these innovative solutions to meet the growing demands for flexibility, efficiency, and sustainability. Samsung, among other key players, has been at the forefront of large-scale vRAN and Open RAN rollouts across North America, Europe, and Asia.

The adoption of O-RAN-compliant, Open vRAN architectures has demonstrated the potential to deliver performance on par with—or even superior to—traditional RAN systems. While trials and commercial deployments have validated their capabilities, scaling these solutions introduces challenges, such as integration complexities, security concerns, and organizational disruptions. To address these hurdles, operators and vendors alike are focusing on building robust ecosystems, fostering collaboration, and driving continuous innovation.

As adoption expands, operators are reaping an array of benefits from vRAN and Open RAN architectures:

  • Faster site activations: Accelerated deployment timelines facilitate quicker service rollouts.
  • Enhanced resource utilization: Flexible resource sharing improves overall network efficiency.
  • Energy savings: AI-driven solutions enable dynamic power management, reducing energy consumption.
  • Operational agility: Advanced monitoring and adaptive systems boost performance and responsiveness.

Vendors and partners are tackling the complexities of scaling vRAN and Open RAN through collaborative efforts, with Samsung introducing several solutions to improve performance and address integration challenges:

  • Containerized Virtual Cell Site Router (vCSR): The integration of vCSR within the virtual Distributed Unit (vDU) minimizes hardware requirements by utilizing server processing power more efficiently.
  • Energy-saving features: AI-powered tools like Samsung’s Energy Saving Manager (ESM) enable traffic-aware adjustments, such as dynamic power amplifier (DPA) levels, sleep modes for radio units, and CPU power optimization, demonstrating significant energy reductions in large-scale deployments.
  • AI/ML-powered automation: Comprehensive platforms, such as Samsung’s CognitiV Network Operations Suite (NOS), incorporate advanced analytics and automation, enhancing network optimization, troubleshooting, and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

The transition to Open vRAN is not just a technological evolution but a paradigm shift in network architecture. These systems prioritize flexibility and programmability, empowering operators to achieve business objectives that extend beyond cost savings, including faster service rollouts, better customer experiences, and improved energy efficiency.

While Samsung’s contributions in this domain are notable, the larger industry trend toward open and virtualized networks reflects a collective push to shape the future of mobile connectivity. Collaboration across the ecosystem is essential to address challenges and unlock the full potential of these transformative technologies.

Embedded below are some nice explainers and presentations on Open vRAN from Samsung:

As the industry continues to evolve, vRAN and Open RAN are set to play a pivotal role in driving the next wave of 5G innovation and growth.

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Saturday, 16 December 2023

Testing Vodafone UK's Open RAN Deployment Performance

It's been a while since Vodafone selected their UK Open RAN partners. The good news is that according to the press release from Samsung as well as Vodafone UK the rollout has already started. According to the press release, the following partners are involved:

  • Samsung: 4G and 5G radio, including 64T64R Massive MIMO, as well as the software platform.
  • Intel: General Purpose Processor (GPP), acceleration hardware and network interface cards.
  • Keysight: Drive test services using Keysight Nemo Solutions to assure the OpenRAN end-to-end live network performance. Pre-deployment OpenRAN functional and interoperability testing using Keysight Open RAN Architect (KORA) solutions.
  • Dell Technologies: Dell PowerEdge servers designed for cloud-based OpenRAN workloads.
  • Capgemini: Testing partner in Vodafone labs.
  • Wind River: Cloud network platforms (also known as abstraction layer software).

Dr. Peter Clarke, who is an actual medical doctor rather than a PhD, and also a mobile network infrastructure hobbyist, has been featured across our blogs on a regular basis. Recently he took a trip to the coastal town of Torquay, Devon, to see for himself how these Samsung Open RAN networks were performing. Quoting from his LinkedIn post: 

Vodafone UK's Samsung Networks based Open RAN 5G delivers capability and performance to the coastal town of Torquay, Devon, providing a compelling window into the future of radio access architecture. 

The Vodafone spectrum deployed is impressive, illustrating the capability of the Samsung Radios and serving the town well: 90MHz n78 with Massive MIMO on Samsung Active Antenna Units and quad 4G band through Commscope passives.

Throughputs with EN-DC utilising 50MHz n78 carrier were consistently around 500mbps, which for an umbrella site serving a town was pleasing. Field testing video below, in comments, please watch for on the scene testing.

Here is a video from his testing:

I am looking forward to the official results that will hopefully be shared around MWC 2024.

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Friday, 27 January 2023

Seoul Metro Wi-Fi Backhauled by Samsung's 5G mmWave Network Solution

In our earlier posts we talked about how Wi-Fi 6 is being promoted by South Korea's ministry and also how mmWave has not been very successful in Korea. Having said that, earlier last year, Samsung Electronics announced that it has signed contracts with all three South Korean operators to supply its 5G mmWave network solutions and boost connectivity for passengers on the Seoul subway system:

Over 3.6 million passengers use the Seoul subway daily across over 300 stations. With a population of 9.6 million, Seoul is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, with its subway serving as one of the major means of public transportation for the busy metropolitan area. The subway system is expansive, resembling a spider web network that connects Seoul and the surrounding areas, carrying over 30 percent of the city’s population.

While the Seoul subway system has already been providing stable 5G (3.5GHz), 4G and Wi-Fi services, mobile data demands in subways continue to rise exponentially as Korea’s monthly average 5G data consumption reaches approximately 25GB per person.

Later this year, Samsung’s 5G mmWave solutions will enable the subway’s Wi-Fi services to meet increasing data demands by leveraging mmWave’s wide bandwidth, extensive capacity and massive throughput. Subway passengers will be able to enjoy bandwidth-intensive applications such as high-speed, superior-quality streaming for live sports games, movies, mobile games and video communications. These will be delivered at Wi-Fi speeds up to ten times faster on average than currently provided.

In addition to transforming the daily mobile experience for subway users, Samsung’s advanced 5G mmWave solutions will drive a diversified range of use cases and business opportunities for new entrepreneurs, app development startups and consumers. Utilizing mmWave bandwidth can not only bring to life next-generation services such as the metaverse, cloud gaming and Extended Reality (XR) remote learning, but it can also be expanded beyond transportation to industries like retail, medicine, media and entertainment.

A key component of the Seoul subway commercial deployment is Samsung’s mmWave 5G radio solution, Compact Macro, which brings together a baseband unit, radio and antenna in a single form factor. Optimized for mmWave 5G, it uses in-house modems, radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) and digital analog front end (DAFE) ASICs.

Complete press release here. Embedded below is a short promo video on this

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Monday, 15 November 2021

Will Distributed FD-MIMO be next big MIMO Enhancement?

We have looked at MIMO quite a few times in this blog. Back in February we looked at some of the advancements that Samsung and Ericsson had been showing here.

Last year, in a blog post, Samsung talked about Distributed Full Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO). The key points were:

Around that time, the concept of Massive MIMO was proposed in academic papers. These papers proposed the idea of making the signal dimension at the base station much bigger by using a massive number of antennas such that all inter and intra-cell interference asymptotically go to zero. MU-MIMO performance would be improved significantly with a much lower interference level, therefore leading to capacity gain. It looked promising, but no one knew how to bring it to reality, since arranging 10s or 100s of antenna elements in the conventional way (i.e., in the horizontal plane) would lead to a base station that is longer than a bus, so obviously it was not going to work in a real deployment.  

An important breakthrough came when engineers at Samsung noticed that a concept called Active Antenna Systems (AAS), could be exploited to organize 64 or 128 antennas into a 2D active antenna array that is similar in size with a conventional 4-TX system as shown in the middle portion of Figure 1. Such a system is called a Full Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) system. Initial evaluation of the FD-MIMO system coupled with high-order MU-MIMO showed a capacity gain by a factor of 3-4 times for a 64 or 128-TX FD-MIMO compared to a 2-TX LTE system, as was summarized in a 2012 Globecom paper , “Fulfilling the promise of massive MIMO with 2D active antenna array”, and later in a 2013 IEEE magazine paper , “Full-dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) for next generation cellular technology”. 

Samsung has been actively leading the FD-MIMO standardization process in 3GPP from the beginning, including the 3D channel model study in 2012 that paved the way for subsequent system design, the 4G LTE version of elevation beamforming and the FD-MIMO work from 2014, and more recently the 5G NR-MIMO version of FD-MIMO. Samsung has also been a leader in prototyping and testing the feasibility of the technology and was the first to demonstrate an FD-MIMO system supporting 12 simultaneous MU-MIMO users achieving a record aggregate capacity of > 20 bps/Hz in early 2015. These feasibility study result was later published in a 2017 IEEE JSAC paper , “Full Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO): demonstrating commercial feasibility”.

…

Initial system level simulations show that the D-FD-MIMO system achieves up to 2 times cell average throughput gain compared to the FD-MIMO system, lifting both cell capacity as well as average user throughput. Such a cellular system can be flexibly deployed to “blanket” a given geographical area and provide better service for both outdoor and indoor users. 

We have developed a hardware prototype and performed field test to verify the feasibility and the performance gain of the D-FD-MIMO system. In the field test, 3 distributed LEGO MIMO RFUs and 7 UE emulators were used. When the number of active RFUs increased from one to three, the overall throughput improved by about 4 times.

A significant amount of work needs to be done before we can accurately quantify the benefits of the D-FD-MIMO technology, but these initial results are certainly promising and show a great potential for this new breakthrough of the MIMO technology.

Back in 2017, Samsung researchers also wrote a paper on this topic, Distributed FD-MIMO: Cellular Evolution for 5G and Beyond, which is available on arXiv here. Quoting from the paper:

Distributed Full Dimension MIMO (D-FD-MIMO) is an evolution of FD-MIMO. A D-FD-MIMO network assumes a cellular structure, where a cell is served by one BS and each BS is connected with a large number of antenna elements, of which individual elements are spatially distributed in the cell. One or more antenna elements are equipped with a digital port, and the signals transmitted and received from all the antenna elements within one cell are jointly processed to perform high order MU-MIMO operation.

Such a cellular system can be deployed outdoors in a city-wide area to provide service to both outdoor and indoor users. It can also be deployed inside the building to serve indoor users only. It is also suitable for providing service in a highly populated area, such as stadiums, shopping centers and airports, where a large number of the users are densely located.

Concepts relating to D-FD-MIMO includes distributed massive MIMO, CoMP (a.k.a. network MIMO) and distributed antenna systems (DAS). Distributed massive MIMO treats the entire network as one cell, featuring an enormous number of access points distributed over a large area, jointly serving all the users. pCell by Artemis can be seen as an implementation of the distributed massive MIMO albeit with a smaller scale in terms of the number of antennas. CoMP relies on the coordination among a few transmission points from the same or different sites to enhance User Equipment (UE) experience at the cell edge. DAS is initially proposed to improve coverage in an indoor cellular communication system, and is sometimes adopted in outdoor scenarios as well. One configuration for outdoor deployment is to have a few antenna arrays distributed throughout the cell to perform MIMO operations. Another DAS configuration deploys a number of individual antenna elements in a distributed manner in each cell of the network, which is similar to the D-FD-MIMO setting. Different from our system-level simulation approach, the analysis theoretically derives the asymptotic sum capacity when the numbers of UE and antennas in each cell both approach infinity with their ratio fixed, and assuming perfect uplink power control.

You can get the PDF of the paper here.

We have written about the Cell-Free Massive MIMO here and here. One of the realizations of D-FD-MIMO is as shown in Ericsson Radio Stripes. 

Researchers on this topic may also be interested in watching Wireless Future Podcast episode 13 on Distributed and Cell-Free Massive MIMO (embedded below). The description says:

In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson discuss how one can create cell-free networks consisting of distributed massive MIMO arrays. The vision is that each user will be surrounded by small access points that cooperate to provide uniformly high service quality. The conversation covers the key benefits, how the network architecture can be evolved to support the new technology, and what the main research challenges are.

The description also contains some links and the discussion is also interesting to follow. You can jump on to the video directly here.

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Saturday, 28 August 2021

Samsung's 3GPP-Compliant PS-LTE Network

After having been discussed for years by others, Samsung finally announced back in April that they are powering the world’s first 3GPP-compliant nationwide public safety LTE (PS-LTE) network in Korea, in collaboration with leading mobile operators.

A press release from them said:

This PS-LTE network, operating in the 700MHz spectrum, offers fast and reliable connectivity to first responders in over 330 public safety organizations and agencies, including police, firefighters, emergency medical services and the military.

The deployment includes Samsung’s Mission-Critical Push-to-Talk (MCPTT) with multimedia broadcast capabilities, known as evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS). This enables simultaneous transmission to up to 2,500 user devices per cell, which is more than twice the volume of devices supported by previous generation technologies.

In this buildout, the PS-LTE network was also interconnected with the existing LTE-Maritime (LTE-M) and LTE-Railway (LTE-R) networks that were already operating in the 700MHz spectrum.

With nationwide coverage, the network serves as a unified platform that helps ensure interoperability among various public safety institutions. This delivers real-time accessibility and enhanced communications capabilities among public safety agencies and personnel in emergency situations.

They also released an Infographic and a Whitepaper.

In a recent Networks Techtalk, Timothy Paul discussed Samsung’s latest end-to-end MCPTX solutions that provide powerful data and video communications capabilities designed for first responders and public safety officials. The video of that is embedded below:

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Friday, 26 February 2021

Samsung and Ericsson Talks Massive MIMO


Massive MIMO is a fascinating topic. First is that there is no end to learning about it and secondly, the more information I put out, the more hunger people have about it. In the recent months there have been quite a few product announcements on the topic so we thought, why not do a blog post on it. 

Before we start, why not look at Massive MIMO and Beamforming. Mpirical has a short and sweet video explaining it. It is embedded below.

The video discusses four main topic areas: Beamforming vs Spatial Multiplexing, Beam Creation and Steering, Massive MIMO and finally MIMO Panel Antennas.

Now that we have refreshed the concept, let's look at what the product announcements were. 

The first was this blog post by Ericsson on 'How to build high-performing Massive MIMO systems' where they talked about how Ericsson has mastered the Art and Science of Massive MIMO to both unleash the full capacity benefits and extend the coverage of the new 5G mid-band spectrum - bringing outstanding user experience today, and setting the stage for the advanced applications of tomorrow.

The post starts with the 101 of radio physics, then talks about “Outsmarting” physics with Massive MIMO and Beamforming and finally it talks about the secret sauce in Ericsson AAS (Advanced Antenna Systems). The tweet below shows a practical Massive MIMO antenna and how it works.

In addition, Ericsson announced an "ultra-light Massive MIMO radios and RAN Compute baseband solutions." You can read all about it on their Massive MIMO page here and in the Tweet below.

The second was a press release by Samsung announcing Massive MIMO Roadmap in New Whitepaper, which is available here.

The following video shows world's 1st commercial 5G Massive MIMO Radio by Samsung

As the deployments start ramping up, we will see more product announcements on these. The main challenge that needs solving is the huge amount of power consumption. Probably a year or two before we see a breakthrough.

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Friday, 29 January 2021

Samsung Link Indoor Solutions

Late last year, Samsung launched the Full Suite of 5G Indoor Products aimed at improving 5G connectivity indoors. As we move to higher frequencies for 5G, especially mmWave, alternative solutions will definitely be required to provide higher data rates. 

As can be seen in the picture above, there are three different solutions for different scenarios. The brochure here and this website here provides details but I have highlighted the relevant information below:

Link Cell is a compact indoor small cell that offers robust, ubiquitous in-building 5G mmWave coverage to deliver the high bandwidth, low latency and fast throughput needs for these businesses and public venues. The indoor solution can connect a large number of indoor users to data applications where signals from the outside 5G mmWave networks are hard to reach, enhancing productivity and providing a premium business experience. For enterprises that require dedicated connectivity and additional security needs the Link Cell can also serve as the foundation for a 5G private network. By combining a private 5G Core with Link Cells, an enterprise can have a secure, ultra-reliable, high-speed, low-latency 5G network that can accelerate their automation and digitization efforts.

To meet indoor coverage demands, particularly where capacity expansion is required or anticipated in the near future, Samsung offers a 5G Active DAS (Distributed Antenna System) solution called the Link HubPro. This system is especially useful in large buildings with extensive IT infrastructure. The solution includes two main components: a Radio Hub and Indoor Radio, and supports more diverse spectrums including, low-band and mid-band. With this simple architecture, single Radio Hub will allow a mobile operator to connect multiple radios and making multiple radios work as a single cell to build wide 5G indoor coverage without interference. 

Samsung Link Hub acts as a radio to connecting passive antennas supporting both LTE and 5G. If a building already has an existing passive DAS system, service providers can easily upgrade their indoor network to provide 5G service and reuse legacy cabling to save both time and costs. The Link Hub will act as a bridge between the 5G baseband and antennas by converting data traffic to radio signals, and vice versa, making 5G data traffic possible. The Link Hub can be managed remotely by an operator’s network management system.

The video below explains the solution in detail:

Here is another video that explains the indoor small cell, Samsung Link Cell

As a final thing, it should be pointed out that Samsung’s Link Cell features the Qualcomm 5G RAN platform, which builds on the collaboration between Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Samsung. 

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Friday, 22 January 2021

NTT Docomo's 5G Network is based on 'Open RAN' Principles

I have detailed many different details from NTT Docomo over the years as they are not just one of the few innovative operators but are also very happy to share lots of interesting details. Their RAN Infrastructure post was posted in November but already reached top 5 posts on this blog. 

In a recent interview with Telecom TV, Sadayuki Abeta, Vice President & General Manager of the Radio Access Network Development Department at NTT DOCOMO, talked about the Japanese operator’s experience with Open RAN deployments, starting with its multi-vendor 4G network and now with its 5G rollouts. His talk, embedded below, points out that even though they have not yet adopted vRAN, they consider their network to be Open RAN based on the open Interface principles. 

Back in September, Docomo had couple of announcements about the 5G Base Stations based on O-RAN specifications.

The first announcement was about Docomo and NEC announcing that they have expanded multi-vendor interoperability by interconnecting a new 5G base station baseband unit (5G-CU/DU), developed by NEC and Samsung Electronics and compliant with O-RAN Alliance specifications, with 5G base station remote radio units (5G-RUs) of other vendors on DOCOMO's commercial network.

Expanding multi-vendor interoperability based on O-RAN open interface specifications will enable the most appropriate base stations to be used depending on deployment scenarios and taking advantage of specific vendor and equipment characteristics. This will drive the rapid and flexible development of 5G service areas.

The new 5G base station baseband unit from NEC realizes multi-vendor interoperability and is the result of a partnership between NEC and Samsung. It is interoperable with all existing vendors' 5G base station remote units in DOCOMO's network owing to its adoption of O-RAN open fronthaul specifications; it is also compatible with all existing 4G base stations in DOCOMO's network thanks to its adoption of O-RAN open X2 specifications.

Multi-vendor interoperability using O-RAN open fronthaul specifications was also confirmed for NEC's macro-cell 5G-RU, which provides wide area coverage, and for NEC's fronthaul multiplexer (5G-FHM), which copies and combines the fronthaul signals to and from multiple 5G-RUs to form a single area; both are new 5G base station equipment offerings.

During their collaboration, DOCOMO selected the test items, executed the multi-vendor interoperability tests and analyzed the results; NEC and Samsung Electronics supplied the 5G base station equipment and analyzed the test results.

The second announcement was about DOCOMO, Fujitsu and NEC achieving what they believe to be the world's first carrier aggregation using 5G frequency bands in a multi-vendor radio access network (RAN) based on O-RAN specs.

Carrier aggregation was achieved using the 3.7GHz and 4.5GHz bands designated for 5G networks. In addition to this dual connectivity achieved by bundling LTE bands, downlink speeds of 4.2 Gbps will be achievable, enabling ultra-fast data transmission. DOCOMO already provides commercial 5G services in Japan through a multi-vendor RAN that connects baseband units and remote radio units manufactured by Fujitsu and NEC based on O-RAN's open fronthaul specifications. The same system configuration was used to achieve this 5G carrier aggregation.

Mr. Nozomu Watanabe, Senior Executive, NEC Corporation and Mr. Sadayuki Abeta, VP & GM, Radio Access Network Development Department, NTT DOCOMO explained their Open RAN vision and approach in a Telecom TV interview baback in November which is embedded below.

It's just a matter of time before we see more of these interoperability announcements, not just for 4G & 5G but also for 2G & 3G.

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Thursday, 3 December 2020

Samsung Talks about TCO Optimization to Accelerate 5G Network Evolution


At IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 2020, Young Lee, Head of Network Architecture, Samsung Networks gave a keynote entitled “5G Network Evolution: Next Steps and Challenges.” The keynote emphasized the unbelievable rate of 5G deployment and coverage expansion, the 5G market status in Korea, the economic aspects of 5G deployment, and key technology drivers for 5G evolution. Some of the slides from that event is available here.

Young also wrote a couple of blog posts on "How to optimize total cost of ownership (TCO) to accelerate 5G network evolution". Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

The picture at the top of this post is a fantastic summary of the posts as it shows what contributes to the increase of cost and what helps in reducing the network costs. Before proceeding further, if you do not understand TCO then please check out tutorial out.


Part 1 looks at the different RAN deployment architectures as can be seen in the picture above. Quoting from the blog:

In D-RAN (Distributed RAN), the baseband is co-located with radio. All the baseband functions such as PHY, MAC, RLC, PDCP, and RRC/SDAP are done in the cell site. As basebands are centralized at Edge Cloud/DC, there is gain with simplified radio operation and site leasing cost reduction. In this sense, C-RAN is clearly a cost optimizer.

C-RAN (Centralized RAN) comes with a higher transport cost. As all baseband processing functions are moved to a central hub site, this creates a large amount of data overhead between radio and baseband. Thus, C-RAN requires a very high capacity fronthaul transport network where you may need more fibers and efficient packet switching that supports stringent synchronization. To maintain the gain by centralized architecture, C-RAN requires a fronthaul solution that is economical and technically viable to remain as a cost-optimizer.

Having addressed all these drawbacks of C-RAN, vRAN (Virtualized RAN), the new architecture, is receiving strong interest within the industry. It further enhances the flexibility by virtualizing the functions of basebands in a common resource pool made up of the COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) servers, allocating resources in a flexible manner according to traffic conditions. There is resource pooling gain with vRAN.

  • Resource Pooling gain comes from the programmable S/W control of total cell capacity allocation that can be dynamically changed per traffic conditions: for instance, when more traffic comes from some cell sites measured as the active number of UEs, then the UE allocation capacity for such cells can be dynamically increased. Likewise, when less traffic comes from some cell sites, the UE allocation capacity for such cells can be dynamically decreased.

On the other hand, O-RAN (Open RAN) can also provide cost efficiency and serve as one of the cost optimizers.

  • O-RAN function split is another opportunity to reduce the transport cost by off-loading some centralized Baseband L1 functions to the radio side. Option 7-2x is one of the standardized options by O-RAN and they are discussing other options such as Option 6.
  • O-RAN Function Split helps to reduce transport cost significantly.

Part 2 looks at reducing OPEX to make TCO lower. Four technology pillars are discussed in the blog post as can be seen from the picture above: automation, virtualization, cloudification and network slicing. Success in these four pillars, will accelerate the 5G evolution.

I am not providing the details here, best to check the Samsung blog post.

It is worth mentioning that every region, country and operator is different. While at the high level this makes complete sense, other operators may face completely different challenges. The main challenge all operators face is how to make more money as they have to continuously keep pumping money in network upgrades and new services. Nobody has an answer to the killer application and the killer use case.

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Monday, 19 October 2020

5G Infrastructure in South Korea

The three South Korean operators made a history when they all launched 5G network simultaneously, thereby making South Korea the first country with all operators having launched 5G.


Samsung's big break in 5G came with them being selected by all the three operators for their 5G networks. Now they have written a three part blog and a whitepaper to highlight the progress of 5G in Korea. Links as follows:
  • Key Drivers for Korea's 5G Success (Part One)
  • Key Drivers for Korea's 5G Success (Part Two)
  • Key Drivers for Korea's 5G Success (Part Three)
  • White Paper: Optimized 5G Solutions that deliver on the Promise of 5G
Even with all the progress, it is not a smooth sailing for 5G in S. Korea. A recent report in the newspaper Korea Herald said that More than half a million 5G network users returned to 4G. The article explained:

The figure -- 562,656 users who downgraded from their 5G subscriptions -- accounts for 6.5 percent of the total 5G network subscribers in South Korea, according to the report by Rep. Hong Jung-min, who belongs to the Science, ICT, Broadcasting and Communications Committee at the National Assembly.

The number of 5G network users as of end-August was 8.65 million in South Korea.

The lawmaker pointed out in the report released in time for the Assembly audit that many 5G users have gone back to the lower-speed network service as the high-priced new network system failed to offer quality connection and coverage.

Here is a video from Samsung showing the Snapshot of Korea 5G

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Thursday, 9 July 2020

Drones for Tower Inspections and Optimization


With the advancements in drone design, technology and automation, over the last couple of years I have noticed quite a few announcements about drones for tower inspections and optimisation. It would not be possible to cover all the companies here that have a solution but here are three big well known names in our industry that we are going to look in this post.


Back in March 2019, NTT Docomo announced that they have agreed to test docomo sky(TM) for Tower Inspection with PT Solusi Tunas Pratama Tbk. (STP), a company that leases out telecommunication towers in Indonesia. 

The service uses drones to photograph base stations and telecom towers and transmit the information to a command center in real time. The partners hope to expand the scope of the test to include other locations and facilities prior to launching a full-scale commercial service in the first half of this year.

 The system being tested is based on an operational drone-based tower inspection system developed by DOCOMO for its commercial network throughout Japan, and supports the "docomo sky" ground control station (GCS) app for assistance in inspection tasks, enabling drone operators to input flight data with ease. For the test, DOCOMO will provide its cloud-based platform for operational support and data analysis. The drones fly automatically, take photos and transmit the images via the platform in real time, enabling technicians to inspect the towers via the docomo sky web browser immediately.

 Indonesia is undergoing rapid urban development, including the construction of tall buildings and transportation infrastructure, which has resulted in large structures occasionally interfering with radio propagation from telecom towers. STP, which manages such facilities, must dispatch technicians to visually check conditions by climbing the towers. The new service will enable remote inspections to be conducted much more quickly and safely than at present, thereby allowing STP to achieve greater customer satisfaction with its service to mobile network operators.

 In addition, the service is expected to support efforts to speed up procedures for inspecting and restoring telecom facilities in Indonesia whenever a natural disaster occurs.

 Going forward, DOCOMO will continue to develop and upgrade its advanced drone services, one of the many ways the company is serving society by leveraging its diverse technical assets and know-how, including mobile network technology and platform businesses.

This week Docomo announced new features of drone platform "docomo sky" and new tariff. Details (in Japanese) available here.


Back in April this year, Rakuten Mobile announced that it will collaborate with Rakuten Group company Rakuten AirMap, Inc., which provides solutions supporting safe and compliant drone operations to enterprises, airspace authorities and drone operators in Japan, in using drones to conduct completion inspections of base stations for its mobile network.

As Rakuten Mobile expands its base station network across Japan, drones will take multi-angle photographs of the newly constructed base stations. In typical completion inspections, an engineer climbs the antenna tower on which the base station is installed and visually inspects the equipment. However, these inspections raise a number of concerns regarding safety, the time required to carry out the inspections and personnel costs. By carrying out the work with drones, completion inspections can be conducted in a shorter amount of time, more efficiently and with a higher degree of safety. Completion inspections will be conducted using AirMap’s TowerSight, a unified system that allows tower companies and MNOs to transform their tower inspections using automated drone workflows.

 To date, Rakuten Mobile has conducted limited trials of base station completion inspections using drones in certain areas, and will now fully adopt drones for completion inspections nationwide. By using drones in completion inspections, Rakuten Mobile aims to improve the efficiency of base station construction and accelerate the expansion of its network area.

 Drone captures of the base station and surrounding area are shared through Rakuten AirMap’s cloud-based inspection system, allowing staff working on the construction of the base stations to manage and share information efficiently and chronologically.

 Rakuten AirMap has been instrumental in establishing the infrastructure for safe and scalable drone use in Japan and will leverage its expertise in completion inspections to contribute to the growth of drone applications in business. The two companies are also looking into the use of drone-based inspections during natural disasters and other emergency situations.

The official Rakuten Blog has a much more detailed article here.


The final announcement is from Samsung Electronics where they announced a successful demonstration of their new drone-based antenna configuration measurement solution for 4G and 5G networks in the company’s campus.

This automated solution will offer operators a simplified way to more efficiently manage cell sites, improve employee safety, and ultimately optimize network performance.

 In the demonstration, an engineer on the ground used a smartphone with a remote control application to fly a camera-equipped drone that captured photos of the antennas installed on a building’s rooftop. The visual data was viewable via the engineer’s smartphone and then was transmitted to a cloud server within seconds. The deep learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) solution instantly verified the rotation and tilt of the antennas, so that the engineers could determine if the antennas were installed correctly at predefined optimal angles.

 It took less than a minute to transmit the data and process the results, enabling the engineer to view results on-site in real-time on the smartphone screen. The demonstration verified that Samsung’s solution can accomplish the task within 15 minutes – starting from flying the drone to the delivery of measurement results. This compares to the several hours it can take for a tower climber to prepare, climb up and down a cell tower, and measure antenna configurations.

 In conjunction with this new solution, Samsung will continue to add additional features, which will allow the engineers to remotely adjust the antenna tilts to its optimal position from a mobile device and PC.

 Cellular antennas are typically installed at significant heights on sites such as cell towers or rooftops, in order to ensure optimal mobile coverage. Operator field engineers ordinarily carry heavy and expensive equipment as they climb up cell sites to measure the antenna configurations. With Samsung’s drone-based AI solution, operators will have a new approach for reinforcing the safety of their employees.

The solution’s safety benefits will be especially helpful during site audit and maintenance in the U.S., which often requires two field personnel to be dispatched to a site to audit or adjust the antenna angles -- and requires climbs that use more advanced safety training.

 “As the number of 5G network sites grows, there has been a heightened focus on network performance by operators, and we are seeing an increased market demand for intelligent solutions for site maintenance,” said Sohyong Chong, Vice President and Head of Network Automation, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “Once this solution launches globally later this year, it will offer a safer, more cost-effective and convenient way to satisfy market demands, leveraging our unique capabilities in combining the latest technologies—drones, AI and 5G.”

 Samsung Networks is a pioneer in the successful delivery of 5G end-to-end solutions ranging from chipset, radio and core network to cloud platform for both mid-band (2.5GHz/3.5GHz) and mmWave (28GHz/39GHz) frequencies. The company has been supporting 5G commercial services in leading markets, including Korea, U.S. and more recently Japan, where the majority of worldwide 5G subscribers are currently located.

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Monday, 4 May 2020

Samsung's 5G NR Integrated Radio for mmWave spectrum

At MWC LA last year, Samsung Electronics announced its new 5G New Radio (NR) Access Unit (AU) supporting 28GHz spectrum. This new AU brought together a radio, antenna and digital unit into one compact box, making it according to them, the industry’s first 3GPP compliant integrated radio for mmWave spectrum.


According to Samsung, by integrating these RU-DU technologies with 1,024 antenna elements for mmWave spectrum into one compact box, the new AU can be more easily installed on streetlight poles and building walls, providing operators a faster, simplified way to build out 5G networks.

The AU is also able to deliver an capacity of 10Gbps throughput, enabling operators to deliver higher 5G NR speeds to more users. Additionally, improved cost-efficiency is achieved by eliminating the need for ‘fronthaul’ fiber connections, thanks to the AU’s integration of the digital unit.

This video explains it nicely.



In addition, Samsung recently also announced that it has achieved the industry’s fastest 5G speeds in a lab demonstration that combined 800MHz of mmWave spectrum with MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) technology, running on their AU.


According to their press release:

Using two test mobile devices, the demonstration achieved approximately 4.3Gbps speeds on each, reaching an industry peak speed of 8.5Gbps across both devices. In order to achieve the speed, two key technologies were used: carrier aggregation and MU-MIMO.

 This demonstration highlights the key difference of 5G – its use of mmWave spectrum. The wide bandwidth from mmWave spectrum enables mobile operators to provide multi-gigabit speeds that lower band spectrums are unable to match. With multi-gigabit speeds, users can experience transformational 5G mobile services. Mobile operators will be able to deliver new and rich services such as 8K video streaming, AR remote learning and holistic VR teleconferencing as well as new use cases that are yet to be imagined.


Finally, this Tweet by Samsung Network shows how the AU uses an ultra-quiet convection cooling design that lowers operating costs and environmental noise.

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Tuesday, 26 June 2018

Drones, UAVs, LTE & 5G

Its been nearly couple of years since I was involved with EE/BT for their Airmasts project. Details here with some good links in that post too. Since then many other operators have been involved with something or other to do with drones, blimps, balloons, etc.

Here are a few recent ones that I found interesting


KT has unveiled its 5G emergency network service called Skyship that uses airship drones to search for survivors in the aftermath of disasters.

KT collaborated with local drone maker Metismake to design the helium gas-based airship, which has an attached pod with propellant, network module, high-resolution camera, and a trunk that can deploy smaller drones to the ground.

It was designed in NACA airfoil and can maintain stable flight in 13 metre-per-second winds. It has a maximum speed of 80 kilometers per hour and can fly up to six hours.

More details on ZDNet here.

KDDI announced today that it has successfully completed a live 4K video transmission test using a drone that leverages 5G technology. The test was carried out in an effort to realize consumer services that can benefit hugely from drones, such as public safety and surveillance, agriculture monitoring and disaster response. The test, the first of its kind to have taken place in Japan, was carried out in cooperation with Nakao Research Laboratory of the University of Tokyo, TripodWorks and Prodrone. 

The test area was set up in the university's Kashiwa campus using Samsung Electronics' 5G end-to-end solutions including 5G AU, 5G core and 5G tablet, and for video streaming 28GHz frequency were used. Using a 5G supporting device, the video shot in the air using the 4K camera mounted on the drone was uploaded in real time.

More details on Netmanias here.



Looking at Drone communications over LTE / 5G, Sequans communications have recently published a white paper looking at how LTE would be a communication technology of choice for drone communications over long distances. There are some issues to resolve including how to get reliable signal in the drones as they fly above the typical coverage zone of an LTE antenna.

Details here: http://lteanddrones.com/


Ericsson had done some similar study and published a whitepaper on this topic last year. Details available here but the video below is worth a watch too.


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