MWC 2023: Huawei Expands 5G and Sweeps Global Mobile Awards

Although the annual MWC conference in Barcelona is the high point of the telecom calendar and therefore a major space to launch new products, few solutions providers expanded their portfolio this year as much as Huawei, which displayed 10 new mobile network solutions. CCS Insight attended its launch event and here we share our thoughts on Huawei’s additions and enhancements.

Antennas

One part of the mobile portfolio that’s had a lot of attention from Huawei is antennas, something we’ve also covered in more depth for clients in a report on network infrastructure developments at MWC (see here). The company announced three upgrades to its active antenna unit series, MetaAAU.

Extremely large antenna array software. By combining its hardware with an adaptive high-resolution beamforming algorithm, Huawei claims that its new MetaAAU can provide the same coverage as conventional units under a light load with 50% less power consumption. During idle hours, its power consumption can be reduced to under 10 watts. This helps to solve a significant problem in networks: the radio access network (RAN) is the most power-hungry part of the system, so operators need to be able to put sections into power-saving mode in less busy periods.

Delivering 800 MHz. Based on breakthroughs in ultra-wideband RF modules and power amplification, Huawei’s MetaAAU covers the full C band. Not only is the bandwidth substantial — Huawei believes 800 MHz is the industry’s largest — but because it’s based on a single module, it should enable simplified deployment of the spectrum for 5G networks. This is important because C-band spectrum for 5G is somewhat fragmented, typically at about 3,700 MHz to 3,800 MHz or 3,800 MHz to 4,200 MHz. Huawei’s solution potentially includes another airwave slice too, from 3.45 GHz to 3.55 GHz, big news for the industry.

Improved integration and configuration. Given the often-crowded real estate at cell sites, the market needs compact solutions to address this increasingly common deployment problem. To this end Huawei’s Meta BladeAAU product integrates Meta and Blade technologies to support areas with limited antenna space. The single antenna Meta BladeAAU allows all sub-6 GHz bands to be deployed on a single pole. Its active part, now upgraded to MetaAAU, should optimize energy efficiency while its passive part supports on-demand, optimal configuration of sub-3 GHz spectrum.

These enhancements were acknowledged by the GSMA, which awarded Huawei’s MetaAAU series a Global Mobile Award for Best Mobile Network Infrastructure at MWC 2023.

With sustainability once again a hot topic at MWC, Huawei also launched its Eco series antennas, intended to reduce site power consumption and make all bands 20% more energy-efficient. Designed to improve amplitude and phase precision, reduce impedance loss and boost overall efficiency, Huawei claims these capabilities can also reduce the number of feeders and cables needed at the cell site. If this is so, it should also reduce operational expenditure, another perennial industry talking point.

Base Stations

As I discussed in a previous post, the mobile industry needs an overhaul to keep up with rising data use and to reduce its energy consumption and expenses (see Reducing RAN Energy Usage with Artificial Intelligence). Innovation in the RAN is critical to ensure 5G evolves its capability and efficiency. And at MWC, Huawei launched several such base station and RAN-based products.

One of these was the 32T32R M-MIMO module for macro base stations, which Huawei claims is the industry’s lightest design. This means it can be installed by only one person and carried with one hand, as opposed to larger designs which require two engineers. The lightweight design is intended to help operators be more efficient in network deployment operations, something that’s often a bothersome cost and time investment.

Huawei also launched new capabilities in its ultra-wideband remote radio unit (RRU) series:

Low-power, ultra-wideband 4T4R RRU. Focussing on energy efficiency, the four-transmitter, four-receiver RRU version was upgraded to feature “true wideband” power amplifiers and real-time dynamic power sharing. Its interference cancellation technology is intended to simplify deployment of all frequency division duplex (FDD) spectrum bands and radio access technologies. This can be a complex task for operators with multiple-technology network platforms, with the above technology going some way to streamlining the process.

Optimal power ultra-wideband 8T8R RRU. RAN operations can be a trade-off between radio performance and power consumption. In particular, massive-MIMO has raised concerns because of the energy required by multiple-radio units to deliver capacity increases. But Huawei claims this unit can simultaneously boost network capacity and coverage, as it’s been upgraded to feature high-precision beamforming technology designed for FDD bands. In medium- and heavy-load scenarios, the device enables 100% dynamic power sharing between carriers and radio technologies, allowing the same performance at 30% lower energy usage. This focus on power-reduction in the RRU is important to ensure capacity doesn’t come at the cost of the environment.

Beyond this, Huawei launched FDD BladeAAU, a combination of FDD massive-MIMO and advanced transparent antenna technology. Huawei’s FDD massive-MIMO intelligent beamforming algorithm flexibly supports 4G and 5G, and according to the company it can increase capacity by five times. If that’s true, it could go a long way to meeting operators’ needs for capacity growth in hot spots, as well as tackling 4G congestion and poor indoor 5G experience. Huawei’s FDD beamforming series won it another Global Mobile Award, this time for Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough.

Other RAN-related launches also aimed to address the infrastructure’s existing limitations. These included LampSite 5.0, a highly integrated indoor solution supporting multiband and multiple radio access technologies on a design with a 25% reduction in weight and volume, alongside a 40% drop in power consumption. There was also IntelligentRAN, a network management solution that Huawei says optimizes performance and delivers increased energy savings, simplified operations and efficient maintenance.

Transport Network

As 5G deployment accelerates, traffic growth drives operators to upgrade their transport networks. For many cell sites fibre’s too costly an option, so having microwave solutions providing air interface capacity of 50 Gbps and to-site capacity of 25 Gbps gives a viable high-capacity wireless alternative.

Transmission over a certain range is usually difficult for E-band millimetre-wave backhaul. But at MWC, Huawei launched its MAGICSwave solution. It features two transmitters and two receivers and supports 800 MHz bandwidth, enabling scaled carrier aggregation deployments based on different spectrum. Powered by Super MIMO, it increases E-band’s transmission distance by 50%, making it possible for operators to use the higher-capacity radios for long-reach transmission.

Huawei also had new product launches in: cloud and data centre; enterprise and industrial communications; optical networking; content delivery; and data storage, among others. It also won another Global Mobile Award for Best Mobile Innovation for Emerging Markets with its RuralLink solution for remote areas. Continuing its sweep, it received the 5G Industry Challenge award with its partners Midea and China Mobile for a 5G fully connected factory project in Jingzhou, China. And this isn’t the first year this has happened.

All this recognition indicates that Huawei continues to compete for technological leadership in an evolving mobile infrastructure space — and that the mobile infrastructure industry still has many ways to improve. For more information about our research in this area, please get in touch.