Distributed Base Station: A Benchmark for Mobile Base Station Architecture Born in the 3G Era

Huawei's distributed base station was developed to meet the needs of our customers. Our innovation solved a problem faced by telecom operators around the world, and significantly reduced both their capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX).

In 2002 when 3G rollout started, Huawei began to develop the mobile network market in Europe. European mobile operators at the time were facing significant challenges from the high price of site acquisition. In a standard base station, the radio frequency unit and the baseband processing unit were in the same cabinet. The base station was a bulky piece of equipment and a major electricity user, and it was heavy and difficult to install. European nations were keen to maintain their living environments, and permission had to be obtained for every new base station and high prices had to be paid for the space. In an analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of one of our customers at the time, the equipment represented only 15% of total costs while site acquisition represented 43%.

For example, simply the rent for a place for an outdoor base station could cost up to EUR7,000 per year. This meant a TCO of EUR70,000 over 10 years. For an average network of perhaps 3,000 sites, leasing sites at that rate would require EUR210 million over 10 years.

After months of site survey and research, Huawei proposed a new, distributed architecture. The BBU would remain in the existing equipment cabinets owned by the operators, but the RRU could be made out of waterproof material, and positioned on poles. This meant that the base station could be slimmed down into two separate small units, the baseband unit (BBU) and the remote radio unit (RRU). Customers would no longer need the space for large equipment racks, their power costs would fall, and the equipment would be much easier to transport to the site and install. It was a massive saving in network construction costs.

In 2005, our innovative distributed base station with separate BBU and RRU was deployed for the very first time by Telfort, a telecom operator in the Netherlands. When Huawei had completed the installation, Telfort calculated the actual reduction in their OPEX, and found that the savings were even greater than Huawei had originally projected. The Huawei distributed base station solved the problems of high CAPEX and OPEX for European operators, and it changed the way our customers perceived us. Since then, the distributed base station has become the mainstream architecture of the next generation of mobile base stations.