PRESS RELEASE: On September 3, 2024, China Mobile released a white paper named a new converged 5G-A radio access network (RAN) architecture at “2024 5G-A Technology Innovation and Intelligent Application Development Forum”. This marks a significant step forward for China Mobile in driving the development of 5G-A technologies and fostering a more open, collaborative, and innovative 5G-A ecosystem.
The rapid digital transformation in China and around the world is driving the emergence of new business forms, such as the low-altitude economy, new audiovisual experiences, and smart transportation. These new businesses require networks to provide precise sensing, in-depth data analysis, and efficient decision-making capabilities, and computing resources to be flexible and scalable. This highlights the importance of pursuing converged innovation of communications, sensing, intelligence, and computing technologies. As a core part of networks, RANs require a constantly-evolving architecture to support the convergence.
Against this backdrop, China Mobile proposed the new converged 5G-A RAN architecture that features an integrated and universal centralized computing unit (CCU). The CCU consists of a baseband unit (BBU) and an AI integrated wireless unit (AIWU). It supports heterogeneous computing for flexible resource sharing among multiple services. By allowing the flexible configuration of CCUs and BBUs, this architecture decouples hardware resources from sites to better support new technologies, services, and applications.
The architecture is designed to evolve with new technologies and services. By introducing distributed intelligent computing, it can support lower-latency services and local processing. By upgrading CCU’s intelligent computing capabilities, it can deal with the explosive growth of services.
In addition to the architecture, the white paper presents innovative solutions, including forward-compatible system convergence, dynamic sharing of general-purpose and specific-purpose heterogeneous resources, and elastic, scalable self-networking and self-healing. These solutions enable the base station architecture to support smooth evolution, general-purpose and specific-purpose heterogeneous resources, resource convergence, on-demand deployment, and flexible capacity expansion.
China Mobile had integrated sensing and intelligence into the new architecture and applied it to drone detection and service identification. The architecture had been successfully verified on live networks across multiple provinces in China, with promising prospects for widespread adoption.