Huawei and NTT DOCOMO have completed a successful joint field trial for 5G mobile communications over a long distance with 39 GHz Millimeter Wave (mmWave) band in Yokohama, Japan.  Long-distance mobility transmission over 5G mmWave is one of the enabling technologies to realize 5G enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and ubiquitous connectivity of massive data rate whilst fully leveraging the current macro-cellular sites investment by operators.

In this trial, the downlink data transmissions were achieved at a maximum speed over 2 Gbps on a testing vehicle which was equipped with a user equipment (UE) equivalent to a mobile phone, while driving at speeds over 20 km per hour.

Achieving wide area coverage and mobility performance on 5G mmWave is still a technological challenge for 5G industry. High propagation loss of mmWave signals limit its coverage, while narrow directional beam required to focus the transmission power makes the mmWave beam to track the mobile device becomes more difficult.

The joint field trial conduced in November 2017, successfully demonstrated that 39GHz mmWave can be used for the long distance transmission in both stationary and mobility scenarios even in urban complex deployment environments. The partners recorded over 3 Gbps downlink throughput on the stationary user equipment (UE) at a distance of 1.5 km and over 2 Gbps at a distance of 1.8 km on 39GHz mmWave. The trial have validated and proved the effectiveness of two companies’ mmWave technologies to provide range of 5G services which requres wide area coverage.

The test system was made up of one base station on Yokohama Media Tower that works on the 39GHz band and an UE on a testing vehicle. This trial boasted the innovative metamaterials based compact focal lens antenna with advanced beamforming (maximum gain of 31 dBi) technique to concentrate the radio waves in a certain direction to enable long distance transmission. The advanced beam tracking technique is employed to track UE on a testing vehicle traveling at speeds over 20 km per hour. 

The invented mmWave beam processing algorithms are used to allow the best beam selection, fast beam tracking, and fast beam switching for the best performance for mobile terminal. Moving at about 25 km per hour, the terminal user experienced the high speed transmission and stable throughput.