5G small base stations are about to take off!

On the one hand, the higher frequency band of 5G makes it difficult for outdoor macro base station signals to reach indoors, and on the other hand, in the 5G toB era, more and more business and traffic demands occur indoors. Faced with such a "dilemma", the industry predicted that the demand for small base stations in the 5G era will usher in explosive growth long before 5G was born. To this end, a large number of suppliers have already done their homework and are working hard to welcome the arrival of the new trend.

Outdoor first, indoor second, macro first, micro second, is the construction path of almost every generation of mobile network. Since the commercialization of 5G in 2019, with the construction of millions of medium-frequency and low-frequency 5G macro stations, outdoor 5G signals have achieved large-scale coverage. Now entering 2022, facing the growing demand for indoor coverage, the 5G small base stations that the industry has been looking forward to are about to debut.

On January 10, 2022, an inconspicuous announcement made people vaguely feel that this 5G small station hurricane was just starting to rise.

China Telecom issued the "2022 5G Extended Small Base Station Equipment Technical Testing Announcement" and stated that it has decided to launch the 2022 China Telecom 5G Extended Small Base Station Equipment Technical Testing. The test results will be used for China Telecom's 2022 5G Extended Small Base Station product centralized procurement.

The announcement also stated that the 5G extended small base station participating in the test consists of a three-level architecture of a host unit, an extended unit, and a remote unit, including two models: a 5G single-mode extended small base station and a 5G dual-mode extended small base station. This test will focus on the basic capabilities, stability, and wireless connection capabilities of the equipment.

"Host unit, extension unit, remote unit" are very familiar terms. In recent years, we have seen many companies release 5G small station solutions based on this three-level architecture.

Let’s take stock of these companies and their small base station products. We may see them in the upcoming fierce 5G small base station centralized procurement competition.

Huawei Lampsite

In 2018, Huawei released the 5G LampSite indoor base station product, which includes a three-layer architecture of BBU, RHUB and pRRU. Among them: RHUB is mainly responsible for CPRI data processing and providing high-speed interfaces, connecting BBU and multiple pRRUs, and supporting RHUB cascading; pRRU (Pico Remote Radio Unit) is a radio frequency remote unit, which is mainly responsible for radio frequency signal processing.

Image source: Huawei

In 2020, Huawei upgraded its 5G LampSite and launched the second-generation 5G LampSite product that supports larger bandwidth (200-300MHz). It also launched the lightweight 5G LightSite for low-traffic scenarios and the LampSite EE (Enterprise Edition) product for industry scenarios.

Subsequently, Huawei innovatively integrated outdoor Massive MIMO technology with indoor LampSite products to exponentially increase indoor capacity.

ZTE Qcell

ZTE 5G Qcell consists of three parts: BBU, pBridge, and picoRRU. It supports large bandwidth of 100MHz to 300MHz, can meet the indoor large bandwidth and multi-service requirements of the 5G era, and can also deeply customize differentiated deployment solutions for different scenarios.

Source: ZTE

Among them, pBridge supports multi-level cascading, picoRRU supports integrated lightweight cable connection of CAT6a network cable or optoelectronic composite cable, and can also merge multiple Pico RRUs into a super cell, which is conducive to reducing switching and interference, and flexibly scheduling wireless resources.

Ericsson RDS

Before the 2018 Mobile World Congress, Ericsson announced that it would launch Radio Dot System, an indoor small base station solution supporting 5G NR, in 2019. It pointed out that due to the use of higher frequency bands by 5G NR, traditional passive indoor distribution faces challenges such as large feeder transmission loss and difficulty in expanding capacity when evolving to multi-MIMO, while active indoor distribution faces problems such as high product complexity and inability to reuse old equipment. It believes that Small Cells are "the next big thing."

Image source: Ericsson

Ericsson Radio Dot System also has a three-level architecture, including baseband unit DU, IRU (Indoor Radio Unit) and antenna part Radio Dot. CAT6a network cable is supported between Radio Dot and IRU, and optical fiber is used to connect IRU and DU. RDS is also one of Ericsson's 5G private network products. It has been deployed in some overseas 5G dedicated frequency networks. For example, Bosch's 5G private network in Germany uses RDS.

Nokia ASiR

Nokia's AirScale Indoor (ASiR) system mainly consists of three parts: digital baseband, Smart HUB and p-RRH. The p-RRH also supports Cat 6a network cable and POE power supply. The entire product is small and concealed, and can be quickly and easily deployed in public indoor and enterprise scenarios.

Source: Nokia

Nokia said that the system has a compact appearance, flexible configuration, supports cell merging and splitting, is easy to expand and upgrade, and can be remotely managed and controlled. It is an ideal solution to replace the complex and expensive traditional indoor distributed systems.

China Information and Communications Technology Pico

China Information and Communications Technology has released the 4TR Pico product for indoor coverage, and has also developed the PinLight 4G/5G dual-mode digital indoor distribution solution for hotels, guesthouses, supermarkets, etc. The PinLight solution mainly consists of a baseband unit, a multi-port aggregation unit, and a remote unit.

Comba 5G Cloud Station

Comba 5G cloud base station networking architecture consists of three parts: 5G host unit (AU), 5G extension unit (SW) and 5G remote unit (DP).

Source: Comba

Among them, AU uses general-purpose servers, supports software and hardware decoupling, supports cloud and virtualized deployment, and can achieve flexible and customized deployment on demand through general-purpose hardware and open architecture; SW is responsible for downlink data distribution and uplink data aggregation, and remotely powers DP through optical-electrical hybrid cables; DP is responsible for RF transceiver functions.

H3C 5G Cloud Small Base Station

The 5G cloud-based small base station launched by H3C consists of a baseband processing unit (BBU), a expansion unit (FSW) and a remote radio unit (pRRU). The expansion unit supports cascading and connects multiple remote radio units. The expansion unit and BBU are connected by optical fiber, and the expansion unit and radio unit are connected by an optical-electrical hybrid cable.

Source: H3C

Similar to Comba 5G Cloud Base Station, this solution adopts an open concept and cloud-based design, uses general-purpose servers as BBU hardware, supports containerized and cloud-based deployment, supports co-deployment with UPF and MEC, and can be customized to meet diverse indoor coverage scenarios.

Ruijie Networks 5G Cloud Base Station

Ruijie Networks released a 5G digital indoor small base station solution based on the X86+FGPA architecture in 2019, which can flexibly and economically meet the needs of indoor deployment scenarios. The solution mainly consists of three parts: the pico base station host (BBU), the expansion unit (pHUB), and the remote unit (pRRU), and supports the integrated delivery of BBU, pHUB, lightweight core network, and UPF.

Source: Internet

Baicaibang 5G Extended Small Base Station

Baicaibang's 5G extendable small base station consists of three parts: 5G BBU, rHUB and pRRU. It is also based on an open platform and hardware and software decoupling design. It can realize cell merging and splitting through software, and is flexible and economical.

Source: Baicaibang

. . . . . .

Due to limited space, there are many 5G small base station players that will not be introduced one by one.

In short, in the 5G era, as 5G large-bandwidth applications continue to become popular and expand to the toB field, a large number of indoor scenarios are facing blind spots and hot spots, and the demand for 5G small base stations will increase significantly. Facing the large market of small base stations, traditional equipment manufacturers and new players have already poured into the market. In 2022, as operators start centralized procurement and large-scale deployment of 5G small base stations, a bloody battle for the market may kick off.