In the last few months Huawei have produced some short videos explaining how antennas work and what innovations they are doing which is allowing them to have an edge over their competitors. The videos are embedded as playlist below.
There was a separate video explaining Radome, the antenna shell that needs to be weather-proof and withstand temperature fluctuations from -40˚C to 55˚C while still being ultra-light and signal-penetrable. Here is a video on that
Let us know if you know of other interesting videos on these topics.
There is a Massive MIMO weight wars taking place. Last month, Ericsson announced that it had a 64T64R Massive MIMO antenna radio unit that weighs just 20kg. Two days later, Huawei announced at MWC Shanghai that its latest equivalent tips the scales at only 19kg. The Mobile Network covered it nicely here and so did Light Reading here.
While Huawei & Ericsson are number 1 and 2 players in the world, at a far smaller scale is KMW (Korea Micro Wave). In conjunction with RCR Wireless, they announced a C-band 64TRx 640W 25kg mMIMO Hardware Ready along with a whitepaper and a video.
The whitepaper can be downloaded from here and the summary says:
Massive MIMO technology has been deployed for capacity improvement as the 5G NR system. However, in the aspect of coverage expansion, there has been no satisfactory solution so far.
KMW applies the Modular Architecture technology to develop the mMIMO RU (64TRx, 640W, 25kg) with the natural convection cooling system as a solution of 5G coverage expansion.
This Modular Architecture, AFAM (Antenna, Filter and Power Amplifier Module), introduces Radio’s heat source separation that maximizes heat dissipation performance and minimizes the size and weight. And it allows operators to provide the desired smartest service at a lower investment.
Modular RU can also be a standardized platform with easy frequency variation just in time. Moreover, if the market requests O-RAN RU, the product shall be provided on time with the set of HW/SW.
KMW is a professional RU H/W company delivering 5G mMIMO RU to Global Market collaboration through S/W JDM with Global OEM. KMW is ready to cooperate with the global partners and customers.
It would be nice to see some of these massive MIMO units deployed in Open RAN networks later this year.
Last year Vodafone had announced a bevy or Open RAN radio vendors. Hopefully we will see some more massive MIMO units from others.
Finally, it should be noted that KMW also goes by the name GigaTera, which is what was earlier known in the US as KMW Inc. Details here.
At the ONF 2020 Spotlight Series, '5G Connected Edge Cloud for Industry 4.0 Transformation', Ishwar Parulkar, Chief Technologist, Telco, Amazon Web Services (AWS) gave a keynote presentation on 'How AWS Edge is Powering Industry 4.0'.
He talked about how AWS Edge is powering the 4th Industrial Revolution by building the connected edge cloud. His talks covers:
Edge Developer Expectations
AWS Vision of Edge
Edge Infrastructure
AWS Enabled Private Networks
Services for the Connected Edge
The video of the talk is embedded below and the slides are available here.
Back in January, AWS also released a nice whitepaper on 'Next-Generation Mobile Private Networks Powered by AWS'.
This whitepaper introduces the relevant use cases, solutions, and best practices for designing and deploying mobile private networks powered by AWS. Cloud-enabled mobile private networks allow enterprises, governments, and professional organizations to autonomously deploy their own geo-dispersed, secure mobile private networks. These networks cover private facilities while meeting their performance, reliability, availability, security, and scalability requirements.
Dr. Chih-Lin I, China Mobile Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, in charge of advanced wireless communication R&D effort of China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI) recently spoke at Electronic Design Innovation Conference (EDI CON) which was held October 13-14, 2020 in Beijing at the China National Convention Center. (CNCC).
Her plenary talk on "The Myths and Facts of O-RAN Whitebox" looked at the 5G progress of China Mobile, the O-RAN Alliance architecture and workgroups and then focussed on O-RAN WG7, Whitebox Working Group. She then discussed the 6 myths of white boxes. She then discussed the usage scenarios and finally the roadmap of O-RAN whitebox.
In addition to the above, she discussed a lot of additional information and shared some valuable insights and trials information. Thanks to the Microwave Journal for making the video available.
