one5g still has a long way to go

This year is the first year of 5g large-scale commercial development and the first year of 5g era (2020-2030). The curtain of 5g commercial development has just opened, and the road behind is still very wide and long. It is expected to have the following three stages.

① In the first half of this year, 5g networks and terminals were dominated by NSA and began to evolve to sa. At present, the 5g network coverage is not sufficient (mainly covering the main urban areas and the main urban areas of ordinary cities and some service demand scenarios). The prices of 5g terminals and 5g modules are high, and 5g services are concentrated in embB large bandwidth services, such as video and game applications.

② From the second half of this year to 2021, 5g SA realized large-scale commercial use, urllc began to upgrade, edge computing was deployed orderly on demand, and 5g industrial chain gradually matured. The urban area has realized continuous 5g network coverage, and gradually expanded to the rural business demand scenario. The prices of 5g terminals and 5g modules have decreased, and 5g services have begun to develop to low delay.

③ In the second half of 2021 and beyond, 5g network coverage continues to expand, the coverage depth and thickness are gradually strengthened, with greater bandwidth, lower delay and higher security, fully meeting the application requirements of high speed, high reliability and low delay, laying a foundation for the digital networking and intelligence of thousands of banks and industries, and 5g industry applications will grow explosively, 5g true formal modeling is integrated into all walks of life.

two5g technology needs to evolve

At present, it seems that the objectives of the first phase have been achieved. In retrospect, under the guidance of the Ministry of industry and information technology, imt-2020 (5g) promotion group has carried out 5g technology R & D test (divided into key technology verification, technical scheme verification and system networking verification) since January 2016. Major system equipment manufacturers such as Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and Datang have deeply participated in jointly formulating equipment technical requirements and test specifications and comprehensively carrying out test verification, Accelerate the maturity of 5g industry; Chip enterprises such as Qualcomm and instrument enterprises such as Shide technology actively participated in accelerating the construction of rel-15 5g NR complete industrial chain by carrying out interconnection test with system equipment manufacturers.

In the above second and third stages, in order to achieve the goal of promoting 5g to truly integrate into all industries, serve the public and even "5g change society", it is urgent to accelerate the research on the key core technologies of 5g.

As a 5g full version, rel-16 introduces many enhanced system features and functions to strengthen the business application performance of embB and urllc. Specifically, one is to enhance the network carrying capacity with multi antenna enhancement, license free, higher frequency band, relay and fixed mobile integration; Second, improve basic capabilities with son / MDT, positioning, terminal energy saving, voice, slice enhancement and automatic operation; Third, expand vertical industry applications with low delay, high reliability enhancement, Internet of vehicles, industrial Internet, vertical LAN, etc.

5g's technology and standards are still in continuous development and evolution. The standardized rel-17 is about to start. It aims at more vertical industry fields related to 5g, and makes the system functions that rel-15 and rel-16 fail to realize and complete more comprehensive and refined, so as to be closer to realizing the 5g mobile communication vision of "full spectrum, full coverage and full application". Specifically, the first category of rel-17 will be continuity projects such as low delay, high reliability, industrial Internet, network assisted terminal energy saving, multi antenna technology enhancement, positioning, Internet of vehicles, relay technology, higher spectrum communication, license free scheme, satellite communication, service architecture enhancement, network slicing, network automation, son edge computing, etc; The second category of rel-17 will be new projects such as multicast broadcasting, terminal direct communication (for emergency communication and commercial applications), multi SIM terminal optimization, interactive service, small data transmission optimization scheme, coverage enhancement, large connection applications for medium rate and regional coverage, so as to enable new applications and capabilities.

threeStrong support: 5g test and measurement

Industry authoritative experts predict that 2021-2022 will be a complete 5g network construction stage based on rel-16, and the capacity of 5g network will be improved based on rel-17 from 2023 to 2025.

It can be seen that for rel-16 and rel-17, the end-to-end 5g industry will enter a new and greater stage of innovation and development.

The whole 5g industry involves chips, terminals, base stations, 5g networks, chip design tools and software, chip OEM lines, instruments (test and measurement), operating systems, apps, etc. among them, test technology runs through the R & D, production, acceptance and other links of subsequent 5g base stations, chips and terminals, which will directly affect the industrialization process of the subsequent 5g industry chain.

Therefore, it can be said that 5g can go as far as communication test and measurement can go. It can be predicted that with the further development of the follow-up 5g mobile broadband network and the Internet of things, especially the interconnection of all things in the fields of new applications in industry, medical and robot control, inter vehicle communication, etc., the corresponding base station simulator, terminal simulator, RF consistency test system, RRM consistency test system, massive MIMO signal analyzer The demand for test equipment such as massive MIMO channel simulator is also more and more extensive. For example:

① The terminal simulator is urgently needed for system prototype verification. Subsequent 5g communication technology system level R & D and prototype verification need the support of 5g terminal simulator. The simulator needs to meet the technical requirements of 5g multi scene to complete the simulation of 5g terminal physical layer and high-level protocol, flexibly realize the air interface technical scheme on the terminal side, and cooperate with the system equipment manufacturer to complete various 5g new technology tests.

② 5g signal simulation and analysis instruments are urgently needed. During equipment development and production, various parameters of processed parts and semi-finished products need to be tested or supervised qualitatively or quantitatively. After the whole machine is made, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive test on the function, performance and reliability of the whole machine. After sorting, analyzing and evaluating the tested data, the results are compared with the phenomena and problems in the development and production process. Only through the above complex and accurate test operations can we ensure that more, faster and better 5g new products with lower price can be produced and supplied to the market.

For example, millimeter wave is one of the key technologies of 5g. The domestic millimeter wave band may include 24.75-27.5ghz and 37-42.5ghz, with extremely broad application prospects, but RF devices such as power amplifier (PA) are facing severe challenges. China is fully developing PA products supporting the above frequency band and 800MHz bandwidth. Traditional CMOS process PA can not provide high enough output power, while GaAs and Gan process PA can support higher transmission power and larger modulation bandwidth in millimeter wave band. For the testing of 128 and 256 channels, and even the testing of 1024 channels in the future, the sharp increase in the number of channels leads to the sharp increase in the cost of testing equipment, and the reduction of testing efficiency caused by the calibration and correction of consistency between channels. A fast and economical microwave and millimeter wave testing solution is urgently needed. It is reported that it is an international leading test and measurement enterprise such as Deke technology. As early as 2015, it began to create a prototype test platform for 5g millimeter wave and UWB wireless communication. It carried out the industry's earliest ultra-high speed data throughput test based on systemvue simulation software, and has a deep technical accumulation so far.

③ 5g channel simulator is urgently needed to simulate complex channel environment. For example, the subsequent theoretical and Application Research of massive MIMO and its related technologies, such as signal processing, encoding and decoding, modulation and demodulation, resource management, orthogonal pilot design and three-dimensional beamforming, must be based on a reasonable wireless channel model. In order to study the 5g channel model of the new frequency band based on the channel measurement method, so as to master the change law of the 5g channel in the actual environment, it is necessary to build a high-performance channel measurement platform, and select the measurement scenario to carry out channel measurement activities according to the requirements of the application scenario. The propagation environment of complex channels is harsh and has large dynamic randomness. High quality 5g channel simulator is urgently needed to support the rapid development and deployment of 5g system baseband and and RF chips, base station and terminal systems, and support the subsequent large-scale 5g network construction and maintenance.

The evolution of 5g NR from rel-15 to rel-16 and rel-17 is essentially the process of gradually realizing the three application scenarios and eight key performance indicators of 5g proposed by ITU. Ultra wideband, ultra-high speed, multi-channel, full spectrum, real scene simulation and even simulation pose severe challenges to test and measurement.

The rapid and steady development of the follow-up 5g industry needs a strong guarantee of high-quality testing and measurement. According to the observation of 5g wechat public platform (ID: angmobile), the giant enterprises with top advantages in the testing and measurement market have formed a 5g testing and measurement product system with complete categories and the highest performance in the world. The spot collection has a very complete data package of 5g NR ran testing for the industry's reference, covering the basic knowledge of 5g technology Test and air interface test during 5g deployment of mobile communication network operators, 5g signal generation and analysis, 5g antenna and component test, 5g deployment road test, test during 5g base station manufacturing 5g quality assurance oriented test (5g NR conformance test / o-ran RF test tutorial / 5G core network verification best practice / UEE terminal simulator tutorial / 5G air interface field test system with phased array antenna / channel simulation solution), etc.

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