RCR Wireless News, a professional and authoritative publication in the wireless infrastructure field, recently published an article by Sky Light Research, a third-party market research firm. Written by analyst Emmy Johnson, this essay analyzes the eMBB, mMTC, and uRLLC challenges in the 5G era and the bandwidth, latency, and SDN capabilities that must be provided by future networks to address these challenges. Microwave is key to meeting these challenges and future network requirements.
Here are some of the key highlights from the article.
Can microwave meet the requirements of 5G?
"Microwave backhauls anywhere from 50-60% of all mobile sites worldwide; and as 5G deploys, the number of mobile sites will multiply along with capacity, complexity, and stringent latency requirements. Whether or not microwave can successfully meet each of these requirements is a hot debate. While it is true, that fiber will be used if it is available, it is also true that fiber won’t be able to reach every site, and other technologies will need to be considered. This is where microwave will be essential. "
What are the essential transport network requirements from 5G? How can Huawei’s Multi-wave meets such requirements?
According to this article, the essential transport network requirements in the 5G era are high bandwidth, low latency, and flexible O&M.
High Bandwidth
“Microwave manufacturers have proven that by combining two microwave links together, backhaul capacity of up to 10 Gbps can be achieved. Not only does capacity increase substantially when multiple channels in traditional microwave bands (6 -42 GHz) are aggregated, but when a traditional microwave band and a millimeter wave 80 GHz band are combined, capacity can reach 10 Gbps, covering a span of up to 7 kilometers. Research is ongoing to move beyond the 80 GHz band to the W band (75 -110 GHz) or D band (130-170 GHz) which will push capacity beyond 10 Gbps.”
Most sites in the 5G era must provide 10 Gbps bandwidth, and Huawei Multi-wave core technologies such as carrier aggregation (CA) and E-band have proved that they are capable of providing 10 Gbps bandwidth, fully meeting customers' requirements for smooth evolution towards 5G in different scenarios — for example, evolution from traditional microwave bandwidth, traditional microwave+E-band bandwidth, and E-band bandwidth.
Low Latency
“Another key requirement for 5G mobile backhaul networks is low latency, especially in URLLC applications like automated driving, collaborative robots, and remote surgery. 4G legacy networks are not able to support these critical applications, thus opening up an additional revenue stream for operators willing to make the 5G network investment.”
“To meet the 10 milliseconds end-to-end requirement, transmission latency cannot exceed 5 milliseconds. These low latency levels are attainable through a variety of methods already being used by microwave vendors today. By enabling L3 routing capability to edge, the forwarding path becomes shorter and thus lowers latency, achieving around 1-2 milliseconds. Some microwave radios employ low latency ASIC/algorithms to shorten single hop equipment latency to as low as 50 microseconds. Additionally, smaller cells shorten the transport path and thus lower latency, as do wider channels – both of these techniques are ideal for millimeter wave bands above 70 GHz or for the dual band MW/MMW solution.”
New 5G services require an end-to-end latency of less than 10 ms. Analysts propose that latency for the transmission part cannot exceed 5 ms. Huawei uses L3 microwave to achieve the shortest forwarding path, thus reducing end-to-end link latency and improving coordination gains between wireless sites and user experience. Additionally, Huawei chips shorten the single-hop latency of 50% of microwave links to 50 μs, further meeting low-latency service requirements in the 5G era.
Flex O&M
“SDN on a microwave link can automatically re-route traffic in peak times with congested links in order to keep data traffic flowing. It also can make the network more efficient and keep operational costs in check by managing link usage and adjusting traffic to one or more links. Huawei has shown that by moving traffic off of a spare link and adjusting modulation and transmit power during off-peak times, operators can realize a 15-20% savings in power consumption costs.”
The article highlights how networks in the 5G era must provide more flexible and intelligent O&M as services increase and networks become more complex. Huawei addresses O&M requirements in the 5G era in many aspects. Huawei uses service traffic optimization technologies to maximize network values, E2E service deployment solution to improve deployment efficiency, automatic network configuration solution to simplify network upgrades, and energy consumption management to reduce power consumption costs by adjusting the transmit power during off-peak hours.
Conclusion
“5G is a new frontier that will connect people and things on a massive scale. In order to achieve this, a completely new mobile data network will need to be built that caters to the multitude of applications 5G offers. This new network will require a multi-gigabit high capacity, extremely low latency, and flexible SDN managed mobile backhaul component – and this is exactly what the recent innovations in microwave have achieved. Microwave manufacturers, together with carriers, are building solutions that not only meet these challenges, but scale into the foreseeable future.”
“Leading microwave manufacturers have 5G strategies in place, each meeting various needs of the highly anticipated 5G network today and for the foreseeable future.”
Huawei’s “#Multi-wave, ready for 5G” strategy puts Huawei at the forefront of microwave #5G backhaul evolution. This will allow us to help our customers achieve tackle high bearer requirements in the 5G era and confidently meet any future challenges.
