ICT China 2021 selected Huawei’s 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO solution as the “Best Solution Case” at the PT Expo China (PTEXPO) 2021. The selection recognizes the solution’s outstanding network performance and extensive commercialization.

Huawei’s 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO opens a new path for improving the service experience and capacity of indoor 5G. The solution significantly enhances 5G performance, which makes it ideal for Gigabit connectivity and sustainable capacity expansion.

In places like sports stadiums and transportation hubs, indoor networks need to ensure tremendous capacity for a large number of mobile users. Typically, adding base stations and increasing frequency multiplexing would be used to boost capacity. However, these solutions can cause two major issues. First, there may be interference among cells working on the same frequencies, which limits cell capacity expansion. And also, weaker coverage at cell edges leads to a drastic drop in connection speeds.

Distributed Massive MIMO incorporates the leading technologies of outdoor 5G Massive MIMO into indoor networks to provide indoor networks with joint beamforming and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), enhancing both the 5G network capacity and user experience. Networking no longer focuses on the cell, but on the user. Therefore, this solution can convert interference into enhanced desired signals and eliminates co-channel interference. It enables all system resources to be scheduled dynamically, increasing resource utilization and configuration flexibility. In field testing, users perceived a 30% increase in speed, while users on the move enjoyed consistent Gigabit experience.

The 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO solution has been commercially deployed at scale in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing as well as many other cities in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and other provinces. It serves users in Olympic sports centers, exhibition centers, airports, railway stations, subways, shopping malls, and hospitals. Now, mobile users in these high-density indoor areas can experience wall-to-wall Gigabit. At the same time, operators can deliver the necessary uplink requirements for various industrial applications, such as automobile production, 3C manufacturing, and mining.

Marvin Chen, President of Huawei DIS Product Line, said that Huawei’s 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO enables a ubiquitous Gigabit experience. It’s an enormous step forward for indoor small cell innovation, built upon Huawei’s wealth of technical accumulation. He also noted that Huawei will continue to innovate in response to market requirements, providing the optimal 5G indoor solutions to promote 5G digital transformation across industries.