◎Our reporter Liu Yan
【Experienced say】
In the past ten years, China's mobile communication industry has achieved a historic leap from 4G synchronization to 5G leadership, marking the "China seal" on the global 5G standard.
Talking about the continuous improvement of China's technical contribution in the global mobile communication standardization work by Chinese standard workers for ten years, Huang Yuhong, president of China Mobile Research Institute, said with special emotion: "The pursuit of technological innovation and the dedication to standard breakthroughs are the key to Going up to the difficulty and the blue thread on the road, I don’t know the difficulty until I pass through.”
The ups and downs of 5G standard development
Huang Yuhong led the standardization team of China Mobile Research Institute to participate in the whole process of global 4G/5G standard formulation.
She recalled that the 5G standard had more diverse technical requirements and challenges, which made the 5G standard working group of China Mobile Research Institute focus on technological advancement and implementation complexity, generalized solutions and individual requirements, and backward compatibility all year round. There are repeated trade-offs and difficult choices between various dimensions such as sexuality and forward compatibility, performance and cost.
Compared with the choice of specific technical solutions, the competition for technical routes brings even greater challenges to the formulation of standards.
Huang Yuhong introduced that at the beginning of the 5G standard research, there were differences in the 5G frequency and networking methods in the industry. The operators headed by China Mobile took the lead in proposing that 5G should be based on the intermediate frequency route, while some operators in the United States, Japan and South Korea preferred the high frequency route. ; In addition, there are many "options" on how to network, and various differences have brought a lot of difficulties to the formulation of 5G standards.
In order to bridge differences and build consensus faster, the International Standards Organization's 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) accelerated the development of 5G standards with an unprecedented frequency of monthly meetings.
Channel coding is the key to the standardization of each generation of mobile communication technology, and there has been no Chinese solution in previous generations of mobile communication technology.
In the standard formulation of the first version of 5G, the Polar code proposed by Huawei and the LDPC code led by European and American companies have become the two most powerful channel coding candidate technologies, competing in the same field.
Compared with LDPC coding after more than 40 years of academic research and application, Polar code is in its infancy, and European and American companies are constantly opposed to it.
Huang Yuhong instructed the team to conduct an independent and objective evaluation of this technology, and put forward a multi-coding collaborative scheme based on the situation, and introduced the technical advantages and suggested schemes of Polar codes to representatives of other countries through various channels.
At the 3GPP standardization meeting where the final decision was made, the discussion on the technical solution for the control channel coding continued until two in the morning.
In the final meeting, the resolution of Polar code as the coding mechanism of the control channel was adopted.
China's power is indispensable for global 5G standard formulation
In the 5G era, the technology is more complex, and some architectures are unprecedented. It is challenging to continue to expand China's contribution in the 5G standard.
Huang Yuhong said: "Relevant national departments are strongly organized and efficiently coordinated. In the open cooperation, domestic enterprises have actively invested in technical strength, which has played a huge role in the formulation of global 5G standards."
In 2015, the “Next Generation System Architecture Design” (NexGen) project led by China Mobile was established, marking the official launch of the 5G system architecture discussion in 3GPP. .
After China Mobile proposed a new service-oriented architecture (SBA), European and American companies believed that the architecture would be a big change, and most of them were skeptical or even opposed to it.
After half a year of tug-of-war, the new service-oriented architecture has won the support of global operators.
In 2017, the new service-oriented architecture, as the only infrastructure of the 5G core network, was established as the 5G international standard.
On the stage of international mobile communication standard formulation, taking the leading position in the standard organization is a great contribution to the standardization work.
Over the past ten years, China has continuously risen in leadership positions in various international standards organizations, and has become an important force in promoting the development of global communication standards.
Standards experts from China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Huawei, ZTE, Datang and other operators and enterprises have held important positions in multiple 3GPP working groups, making outstanding contributions to the global 5G development.
With the continuous advancement of 5G standard formulation, China's participation has become deeper and deeper, and China's communications industry has jumped from a "marginal person" in the process of 2G and 3G standard formulation to one of the "leaders" in 5G standard formulation.
Huang Yuhong said: "We are very proud that Chinese companies have contributed more than 50% of the technology in the formulation of 5G standards, becoming an indispensable backbone of 3GPP standardization work." (Source: Science and Technology Daily)