The U.K.’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) marked the official opening of its new, state-of-the-art facility on Tuesday by showing off a new 5G testbed.
The facility, located in a new building at the University of Surrey, is home to 170 researchers and has attracted more than £70 million of investment. The new testbed consists of three macro cell sites spread across the campus, complemented by a range of outdoor and indoor small cells. It also has two dedicated core networks.
"The testbed that we have designed and rolled out [will] make our research more impactful and more meaningful, which leads to potential innovation and future products," said Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5GIC.
At the moment, the testbed is based on FDD and TDD LTE, but "it will be upgraded over time to full 5G capabilities and functionalities," he explained.
At a press conference held at his new facility, Tafazolli outlined the 5G challenge facing the global telecoms industry.
"5G is expected to serve the market for at least 20 years, from 2020 to 2040, so it’s a long time to predict what it will eventually be used for," he said.
"Are we going to do more of the same thing but at a higher speed?" he asked. "We don’t think this is going to be the case."
As a result, as well as researching technologies that meet the broad requirements of 5G – high capacity, low latency, energy efficiency and reliability – the 5GIC and its members will also conduct research into candidate technologies that address more specific use cases.
More than 50 projects are currently underway and two of them were on display from one 5GIC member, Huawei.
The Chinese vendor showed off Radio Computing Architecture (RCA), a means of delivering several bandwidth-hungry services from the same network resource. In this case, Huawei, in partnership with the BBC, used RCA to stream 4K video over the testbed’s network.
Huawei also demonstrated Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA). Designed with the Internet of Things (IoT) in mind, it substantially increases the number of devices that can connect to a single cell site.
Huawei is one of 24 members o f the 5GIC, whose membership also includes 3UK, O2, EE and Vodafone, as well as incumbent telco BT. Ofcom, the BBC, Samsung and Fujitsu are also members.
Furthermore, "we have made special provision for embracing the membership of start-ups and small enterprises to benefit from working with us and our industry partners," Tafazolli said.
At the moment there are nine start-ups working at the 5GIC on top of the 24 member companies.
With the first commercial 5G networks expected to launch in 2020, the 5GIC’s immediate goals are to contribute to standardisation processes underway at the IEEE and the 3GPP. It has also filed more than 15 patents in the last 12 months.
In 2016, "we will ramp up our contributions to the standardisation process," Tafazolli said. "By the first quarter of 2018, our vision is to have a complete 5G technology on campus."
