Huawei Completes the World's First Commercial Verification of SuperBAND

Feb 24, 2019

[Barcelona, Spain, February 24, 2019] Now Huawei has completed the first commercial verification of this solution (phase 1) at its field in Asia Pacific. The verification result showed that the average download rate increased by more than 10% after vertical SuperBAND was enabled.

The verification of phase-1 vertical SuperBAND in Asia Pacific involved four LTE FDD carriers and four LTE TDD carriers. Before the verification, this network faced the problems that plague many multi-band networks across the world: Inter-frequency measurement costs high overhead due to multiple frequency bands; the differences in load, interference, antenna configuration, and other aspects of carriers result in inconsistent effects of different carrier combinations, decreasing user experienced data rates. The SuperBAND solution in this verification enables the complex multi-band measurements to be completed within milliseconds rather than several seconds. Moreover, it selects the optimal carrier combinations for carrier aggregation based on the spectral efficiency of UEs, significantly improving user experience.

At the Global Mobile Broadband Forum in November 2018, Huawei launched the SuperBAND solution. As more 2G/3G spectrums are refarmed for LTE, both the total bandwidth of LTE bands and the number of carriers increase. How to maximize the spectral efficiency of multi-band networks poses a serious challenge to operators and SuperBAND is an innovative answer.

SuperBAND consists of horizontal and vertical SuperBAND. Horizontal SuperBAND uses the super filter technology to fully utilize guard bands, which used to be system overhead, between intra-band spectrum segments. As a result, more available spectrum resources are spared for operators. This solution is applicable for more than 1/4 of the operators in the world that have two or more spectrum segments in a single frequency band. Vertical SuperBAND includes two phases. In phase 1, AI-based virtual grid models for network information prediction are used to quickly select optimal carrier combinations for UEs. Phase 2 will enable ultra-low-latency data scheduling, improving the efficiency of multi-band networks and delivering a 5G-like large-bandwidth user experience.

Cao Ming, President of Huawei's LTE Product Line, says that LTE will still exist for a long time and continue to evolve in the 5G era and that SuperBAND is the key to the evolution, together with other technologies such as massive MIMO and low latency. As a breakthrough in multi-carrier management and spectrum utilization, SuperBAND frees LTE networks from the traditional spectrum constraints and offers better user experience to legacy LTE UEs. This solution will help operators deliver an ultimate 5G-like large-bandwidth user experience simply through software upgrades.