Why are “low-altitude economy” and “synaesthesia” worth paying attention to?

At the beginning of the year, the central and local governments held many meetings to plan and deploy this year's work. In these meetings, a new term frequently appeared, that is, low-altitude economy .

Many provinces and cities, including Chongqing, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Anhui, and Shenzhen, have proposed that they should actively develop low-altitude economy, build low-altitude economy demonstration zones, and expand the application scenarios of low-altitude products and services. Nationwide, more than a dozen provinces have included "low-altitude economy" and "general aviation" in their government work reports.

So, what exactly is “low-altitude economy”?

Our communications industry is about to launch 5G-Advanced (5G-A) this year. 5G-A contains a "synaesthesia" and is often discussed together with "low-altitude economy". What is the relationship between them?

In today's article, Xiaozaojun will talk to you about these topics.

What is low altitude economy?

When many people mention low-altitude economy, they think of drones.

In fact, the low-altitude economy cannot be equated with the drone economy.

The official definition of low-altitude economy is: a comprehensive economic form formed by various low-altitude flight activities of manned and unmanned aircraft, radiating and promoting the integrated development of related fields.

In other words, the low-altitude economy includes both drones and manned aircraft. Low-altitude manned aircraft have not yet been commercially used on a large scale because of the immaturity of technology and safety conditions. Therefore, when we discuss the low-altitude economy, we mainly focus on the application of drones.

The low-altitude economy does not only include the research and development, manufacturing and sales of aircraft (flying vehicles) themselves.

Generally speaking, the four major sectors surrounding low-altitude flight, namely manufacturing, flight, support, and comprehensive services, all belong to the low-altitude economic industrial chain.

The value of the low-altitude economy lies in that it has explored a new spatial range, utilized it, and formed an industry based on the traditional ground space, medium- and high-altitude space, and space space.

In recent years, everyone should have seen that drones are shining in various industries.

Whether it is for personal use such as entertainment shooting, or for industry uses such as logistics and transportation, cultural tourism, traffic management, agricultural and forestry protection, emergency rescue, medical rescue, police security, and government flights, there are a large number of drone application cases.

The characteristics of drones, such as "low altitude, low speed, hovering, low cost and miniaturization", make up for the shortcomings of ground transportation tools and traditional aircraft, and achieve "spending little money to accomplish big things". They have been widely welcomed by users and the market, and their popularization speed is accelerating.

In this context, the government attaches great importance to it and specifically puts forward the concept of "low-altitude economy".

According to relevant departments, the low-altitude economy belongs to the "new quality of productivity", is a strategic emerging industry, and is the country's key development direction in the future.

What is synaesthesia

Now let’s talk about synaesthesia.

The most important thing in developing the low-altitude economy is safety. After all, when walking on the road, no one wants two drones to suddenly collide in the sky and hit their heads.

Moreover, if there are "illegal flights" and illegal activities, it will also bring great harm.

The traditional methods of regulating aircraft mainly rely on formulating laws and regulations, setting up no-fly zones, and applying for flight permits.

The most effective way to track and detect aircraft is radar.

Radar is very useful for medium and high altitude aircraft such as civil aircraft, but it is insufficient for low altitude aircraft.

First, there are many low-altitude buildings or obstacles, and the radar will have a large number of blind spots.

Secondly, radar has high power and deploying it in large numbers in residential areas causes a lot of inconvenience.

Third, building a large number of new radar stations for low-altitude flights will incur huge costs.

Therefore, we began to explore a new method to detect and manage low-altitude flights . This method is synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia, also known as communication and perception integration, is called Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC).

Research on synaesthesia began many years ago. A few years ago, we took synaesthesia as the main research direction of 6G. Unexpectedly, driven by external demand, this technology has become a key technology of 5G-A and will be available to us in advance.

So, what is synaesthesia?

Simply put, it is based on our current cellular mobile communication network (communication capability), superimposed with radar-like functions (perception capability), to detect and track surrounding objects such as drones, cars or ships.

In other words, the communication tower has become a communication radar multifunctional tower, which is more powerful.

From a technical point of view, using base stations for sensing is not difficult to achieve.

Our current communications are all based on radio electromagnetic waves, and the basic principle of radar is also based on radio electromagnetic waves.

The radio electromagnetic wave signal is emitted, and when it hits an object, the signal will be reflected. Through triangulation and comprehensive calculation, the distance and position information of the object can be obtained. Through continuous detection of the unit time difference, the speed information of the object can be obtained.

In recent years, many indoor positioning technologies are also based on wireless communication technologies, such as UWB (Ultra-Wideband), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.

Cellular mobile communications have advantages outdoors and are therefore very suitable for detecting low-altitude aircraft outdoors.

In view of the defects of the traditional radar solution mentioned above, the advantages of the telepathic base station are obvious:

First of all, base stations are everywhere in the city and are in good locations, so there is no need for duplicate construction, saving a lot of money.

Secondly, the base station's integrated wireless signal transmission power is extremely low and will not affect residents' health.

Third, the base stations are integrated and use authorized communication frequency bands, so there is no need to divide the frequency bands separately, saving precious spectrum resources.

Technical Challenges of Synaesthesia

The technical principle of synaesthesia seems simple, but in fact, the technical challenges are still very great if you really want to achieve the expected results.

Traditional cellular mobile communication networks mainly cover the ground, and network planning and optimization are also aimed at ground outdoor users and indoor users in buildings.

To achieve synaesthesia detection, it is not possible to simply adjust the direction of the base station antenna. For the first time, the network is oriented to low-altitude scenarios, and the relevant network planning and optimization ideas are completely different.

The inter-sensory integration of 5G-A requires its own AAU (active antenna) to provide independent ground and air beams, including both communication beams and perception beams.

The perception beam increases the design difficulty and business pressure of the system. The width, number and direction of the perception beam are dynamically adjustable. Through thousands of weighted combinations of parameters including azimuth, downtilt, beam width, number of beams, etc., a large number of beam patterns can be generated to meet the synaesthesia needs of different scenarios.

How to plan parameters such as base station height and downtilt angle, establish a suitable RF model, and achieve the optimal parameter combination is one of the main challenges of synaesthesia.

The communication system mainly uses continuous waves. Radar has both continuous waves and pulse waves (periodically transmitted). How to design the waveform, how to optimize the frame structure, and how to reasonably allocate time slots also need to be fully considered.

In addition, self-interference of RF signals, collaborative perception and precise synchronization of multiple stations, and computing power requirements for synaesthesia operations are all challenges.

If these challenges cannot be solved well, synaesthesia will be difficult to achieve the expected results and commercialization will be impossible.

A pilot project on synaesthesia

At present, with the approach of 5G-A, the testing and verification of synaesthesia is also accelerating.

Domestic operators and equipment manufacturers have cooperated to build multiple field pilot projects and achieved some results.

Before the holiday, Xiaozaojun went to Xiamen and visited the 5G-A synaesthesia integrated pilot system deployed in Huangcuo and Yefengzhai areas by Fujian Mobile and Huawei.

Drone just took off

AAU (active antenna) for low-altitude services

The system is based on China Mobile's 4.9GHz frequency band. Through continuous networking of multiple low-altitude stations (the world's first continuous networking test of inter-sensory base stations), it can detect flying objects in low-altitude airspace in real time while ensuring 5G communication services, thereby achieving low-cost, wide-coverage, and full-time airspace perception.

Tracking of drones using the synaesthesia system

During the on-site verification process, when the speed of the unmanned aerial vehicle reached 60-80 kilometers per hour, the system was still able to quickly lock the target and monitor the drone's track in real time.

Relying on China Mobile's self-developed "China Mobile Lingyun" platform, this system can integrate low-altitude perception, drone networked flight, airspace management, AI analysis and other capabilities, and gradually form an integrated solution for low-altitude airspace management and operations.

Conclusion

In a word, the low-altitude economy has broad prospects, and synaesthesia is of great significance to the country's development of the low-altitude economy.

If you want to develop an industry, effective supervision is a prerequisite. Just like radar enabled us to develop the civil aviation industry well. With the integration of synaesthesia, we can detect and supervise aircraft, guide the orderly and healthy development of the industry, and drive the prosperity of the industry behind it.

Synaesthesia is not only used to serve the low-altitude economy. Its application field is very broad. In addition to target positioning, tracking and identification, it can also be used for target detection and target imaging.

As Xiaozaojun mentioned earlier, in addition to aircraft, it can also be used for mobility detection of cars and ships. Some scenarios such as hydrological monitoring, air pollution monitoring, product defect monitoring, building or bridge crack monitoring, gesture control, etc. can actually be achieved by synaesthesia.

A large number of application scenarios means huge commercial value. In addition to traditional communication applications, the development of a new application field is undoubtedly exciting and exciting for our entire communication industry.

I hope that in the new year, synaesthesia can be better popularized and become a strong market growth point.