SK Telecom and Ericsson have demonstrated a new 5G small cell system that promises to drastically suppress inter-cell interference.
The companies said the demonstration, conducted in an area heavily effected by interference, showed that the 5G small cell system more than doubled cell-edge user performance when compared to LTE.
One of the major shortcomings of LTE small cells is inter-cell interference caused by cell-specific reference signal collision, SK Telecom said. This interference causes service quality to degrade as more overlapping small cells are added.
By addressing this issue, the 5G small cell technology helps pave the way for 5G networks hundreds of time higher quality than LTE, the operator added.
SK Telecom and Ericsson this year agreed to jointly trial technologies that are candidates for inclusion into the 5G standard. As part of this collaboration, the companies plan to establish a 5G testbed at SK Telecom's Bundang Building.
“SK Telecom is delighted to announce the successful development of the 5G small cell system that tackles the root cause of inter-cell interference,” SK Telecom CTO Alex Jinsung Choi said.
“We will continue to work closely with Ericsson to develop key 5G technologies so as to demonstrate a 5G trial service in 2018.”
The ITU recently defined 5G as offering speeds of up to 20Gbps.