Japan's NTT DoCoMo teamed up with Huawei yesterday to conduct the world's first large-scale field trial of new 5G radio access technologies.
The field trial represented the first large-scale test of multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology, which offers a concurrent connectivity of 24 user devices in a macro-cell environment on a sub-6GHz frequency band.
Huawei said the cell average downlink throughput of MU-MIMOs is 1.34Gbps, with 3.6Gbps in peak throughput in a 100MHz ultra-wide band channel. This is more than ten times faster than conventional single user MIMO technology.
It also marks the first opportunity to validate the performance of Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM), the 5G air interface technologies proposed by Huawei.
The trial was conducted at an outdoor test site in Chengdu China. Live video of the trial activity was streamed to its both at CEATEC Japan 2015 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba.
“As the first in the world to succeed with such a large multi-user environment test, this is an important milestone,” commented Takehiro Nakamura, VP and managing directory of DoCoMo's 5G laboratory.
“I look forward to even more impressive results when we move to the next phase of field trial in Japan.”
Huawei and DoCoMo agreed in March to collaborate on joint trials of new 5G air interface technologies as part of both companies' 5G development efforts.