Huawei partners with University of Surrey consortium on 5G Innovation Centre opening

Huawei delivers Ultra-HD video and IoT over 5G air interface

[London, UK, 15 September 2015] Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today celebrated with the University of Surrey and industry partners the official grand opening of the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at Surrey University’s campus in Guildford.

At the opening ceremony of the 5GIC, Huawei streamed Ultra-High-Definition (Ultra-HD 4K) video and a range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications over a 5G air interface on the test bed it has helped install on the University’s campus.

Developed in partnership with Huawei and the 5GIC, the Ultra-HD (4K) video was streamed to a mobile device over an enhanced outdoor mobile network – the test bed – which is a significant first step in delivering the expected capacity of 5G. In this test, a new 5G radio network architecture called Radio Computing Architecture (RCA) has been applied, with which the same resource pool can be sliced to accommodate different 5G applications, including self-driving vehicles, remote healthcare, smart city services and Ultra-HD video streaming, an innovative 5G radio access architecture to enable end-to-end “Network Slicing”.

Dr. Tong Wen, Huawei 5G principal scientist at the 5GIC official opening.

Dr. Tong Wen, IEEE fellow, Huawei wireless CTO and 5G principal scientist said: “Huawei is very pleased to be working as part of the team at the 5GIC. We are committed to researching and developing future technologies that help build better connected societies, businesses and economies, and ensuring 5G is a success is essential in achieving this. Globally we will work closely with research institutions, operators and small enterprises, to turn the 5G dream into reality. The 5GIC will play an important role in this by helping us start testing foundational 5G technologies as early as possible.”

Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Head of the 5G Innovation Centre, said: “We highly appreciate Huawei’s effort in supporting the 5GIC with the 5G test bed of a real-world setting. 5G will be achieved through global collaboration so that everyone benefits from working to a single standard. The opening of the centre today marks an important step in allowing our partners, other universities and the industry to test out new applications and technologies on the 5G test bed, before they are brought to market.”

Another technology demonstration focused on the requirement for 5G to provide the necessary “backbone” to connect the billions of devices which will form the future Internet of Things. At least 300 percent more uplink IoT devices can be connected with the same bandwidth compared to 4G/LTE, as shown in the field test of Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA). SCMA is a new type of multiple access technology, which can be integrated with F-OFDM (filtered-OFDM), Massive MIMO (Massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Antenna Technologies) and other 5G foundational technologies.

5G Innovation Centre Test Bed

The state-of-the-art 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC), housing over 170 researchers and attracting over £70 million of investment, is one of the world’s largest academic research centers dedicated to next generation mobile and wireless connectivity. As one of the founding members of the 5GIC, Huawei has actively participated in the building of the 5GIC test bed, providing expertise and a full set of network test equipment for the large scale radio access trial. The 5G test bed, located on the campus of the University in Guildford, covers an area of four square kilometers.

5G

5G will deliver unprecedented data speeds, promising mobile broadband ranging between 1 gigabit and 10 gigabits per second. It will transform wireless communication, allowing a myriad of applications in machine to machine communication in areas such as healthcare, transport, vehicle telematics, the development of smart cities and entertainment. Overall, Huawei is investing £5m into the 5GIC, part of the $600m the company is committing to 5G research and innovation globally between 2014 and 2018.