PRESS RELEASE: China Mobile Zhejiang and Huawei recently completed the joint testing of LTE TDD and NR dynamic spectrum sharing on contiguous commercial networking for the first time, backed by Huawei’s CloudAIR3.0 solution. The two parties previously completed the world’s first technical verification on a single site in August 2019. On this occasion, however, working with real-life air interface environments and live network traffic conditions, the test used 2.6 GHz 4G/5G integrated base stations in northern Hangzhou and Huawei’s 5G commercial terminals (including Mate 20X). Under both light and heavy load conditions, LTE TDD and NR dynamic spectrum sharing delivered superb performance throughout the test. The results mark an important step towards scaled application for LTE&NR dynamic spectrum sharing.

Introducing cloud technology, the Huawei CloudAIR solution reshapes the air interface utilization from refarming mode to multi-mode dynamic sharing, enabling spectrums to be decoupled from network standards. This benefits greater network flexibility and improved user experience.

This test included 4G and 5G performance on shared bandwidths of 20 MHz and 40 MHz along the drive test routes. The results demonstrate that when 4G networks are heavily loaded, and 5G networks lightly loaded, 4G takes a higher priority than 5G in spectrum uses. This increases 4G carrier aggregation speed by 109% and 4G service throughput by 17%, while maintaining stable network KPIs. When 4G networks are lightly loaded and 5G networks are heavily loaded, 5G has a higher priority, increasing the 5G speed by 40% compared with higher priority 4G. In 4G/5G intra-frequency deployment, CloudAIR enables wireless networks to dynamically adjust air interface resources allocated to LTE and NR based on real-time service requirements between modes and frequency bands. As a result, spectrum resources are flexibly shared with higher efficiency in the time and frequency domains. Utilizing such a load-based spectrum resource allocation, CloudAIR can balance the increasing capacity of 4G and the optimal experience of 5G during initial 5G commercial use. As 5G terminals proliferate, CloudAIR can automatically ensure spectrum resources for 5G networks.

Since the release of Huawei CloudAIR1.0 and CloudAIR2.0, the solution has been widely accepted as a standard for efficient network construction. As of November 2019, it has been deployed on over 140 commercial networks and 330K sites worldwide. CloudAIR3.0 allows LTE and NR deployment on the same segment of spectrum by flexibly sharing the resource in both the time and frequency domains, enabling operators to improve spectral efficiency and accelerate 5G network deployment. CloudAIR3.0 has now been verified on live networks by leading operators in China, Germany, and Poland, including TDD and FDD mode, with large-scale commercial use expected to follow in 2020.