Finding MIMO — 5G from concept to reality

To unlock 5G’s enhanced connectivity and economic value, researchers need a faster pathway to prototype.

Industry analysts predict 50 billion devices will be connected to mobile networks worldwide by 2020. Australia’s biggest telecommunications carrier, Telstra, is looking into building early prototypes to deliver faster mobile network and aims to offer its 5G network by 2020. And the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast is set to be the testing ground for a next-generation 5G network.

5G will undoubtedly evolve our wireless networks to heights never before imagined, but along with these advancements it brings a set of challenges. Researchers must address the requirements of unprecedented wireless data rates, find solutions for network latency and responsiveness while accommodating a one-thousand-fold increase in capacity.

And if all that isn’t enough, service operators are demanding that these advances consume less energy than existing infrastructure.

The solution to these challenges lies in prototypes and, more specifically, the kind of 5G prototypes that enable wireless researchers to test experimental ideas using real systems in real-world scenarios.

National Instrument’s (NI) integrated hardware and software baseband platforms are presently being used in several research and prototyping efforts. These include a partnership with Nokia Networks to demonstrate 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) technology, and with Samsung in building a prototype 5G FD-MIMO base station designed to serve multiple users with high data rate.

When done right, 5G prototypes can lay the foundation for rapidly increasing an organisation’s time-to-market schedule.

Setting a new standard

Recognising the large amount of speculation regarding 5G networks, the world’s standardisation bodies, including the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), have recently begun to transition concepts into reality.

Not surprisingly, the vision painted by Mobile Telecommunication (IMT)-2020, the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) and the 3GPP is expansive. 5G researchers now must build the framework that will redefine our current way of life.

The author: Matej Kranjc, Managing Director, ASEAN and ANZ, National Instruments.

From automobiles and transportation systems to manufacturing, energy, healthcare monitoring and more, life is becoming switched on.

To achieve this, researchers are adopting new design approaches to help with the challenging task of defining, developing and deploying 5G technologies within a random access network.

Most participants acknowledge that conventional approaches to vetting 5G technologies take too long and incur significant costs. Therefore, building a prototype and a proof of concept earlier in the process enables faster commercialisation.

Blazing a new path

To expedite the time it takes to produce a working prototype, many researchers have adopted a platform-based design approach that embraces a unified design flow. It starts with maths and simulation and then maps the algorithm in a system and working hardware.

Consider Samsung, which has built one of the world’s first demonstrators of multiantenna technology with a base station (BTS) that includes 32 antenna elements, called Full-Dimension MIMO or FD-MIMO. FD-MIMO uses a 2D grid of antennas to create a 3D channel space.

With FD-MIMO, service operators can place antenna grids at elevated positions, such as on buildings or poles, and aim the antenna beams at users on the ground or in adjacent buildings to consistently deliver enhanced data rates.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have taken this multiantenna concept to the next level with their Massive MIMO prototype. Massive MIMO increases the number of antennas in a cellular BTS to hundreds.

Composed of low-cost technology, the grid of antenna elements focuses the energy directly at the user while enabling the hundreds of antennas to more easily detect weak signals from mobile devices. Additionally, Massive MIMO uses linear coding techniques to simplify the processing at the BTS.

As more BTS antennas enhance the mobile user data experience, we can see how theory confirms that Massive MIMO may also dramatically reduce the power consumed by both the BTS and mobile devices.

Because multiple low-cost BTS antennas transmit lower aggregate power than a monolithic approach, the power consumed by the BTS may be reduced by a factor of 10 or more.

Fundamentally, enhanced data rates and increased capacity are constrained by spectrum according to Shannon’s theory on channel capacity. More spectrum yields higher data rates, which help service operators accommodate more users.

Image courtesy Idaho National Laboratory.

As such, service operators around the world have paid billions of dollars for spectrum to service their customers, yet the currently available spectrum below 6 GHz is almost tapped out. Researchers are now investigating the possibility of deploying cellular networks above 6 GHz, specifically in the mmWave bands.

Worth noting is that the mmWave spectrum is plentiful and lightly licensed, meaning it is accessible to service operators around the world. Furthermore, researchers at Nokia Networks are also investigating mmWave technologies, and the preliminary results are encouraging.

This year, Nokia Networks demonstrated a fully working mmWave prototype that delivers the fastest rates ever recorded for mobile access. The Nokia Networks prototype, composed of a BTS and user equipment (UE), consistently streamed data at a rate of over 10 Gbps at 73.5 GHz. Nokia Networks’ achievement paints a promising future for mmWave and 5G.

5G promises many exciting new developments to ultimately improve our lives through enhanced connectivity and unlock tremendous economic value. But for us to reap these benefits, researchers need a faster path to prototype. A platform-based design approach promises the possibility to deliver these new developments faster.

Cover image courtesy Paul L. McCord Jr under CC