ZTE Corporation together with Thailand’s leading mobile operator AIS, notched another success in 5G data service with the first 5G smartphone connection in South East Asia.
The world’s first: AIS-ZTE Innovation Center’s trial pushes the curtain to help the whole industry for a better collaboration among multiple devices on 5G network.
UE Aggregation, a feature included among 3GPP Release 18 specifications for 5G-A, allows UE devices to cooperate with one another in order to enhance the uplink.
This non-standardized solution enables a “Remote UE” with reduced coverage or in need of higher throughput, to utilize the resources of neighboring “Relay UEs”.
By combining the power, bandwidth, and channels of all the collaborating devices to form a unified entity, UE Aggregation overcomes the natural limitations of single-device uplink capabilities.
The live trial was conducted on the commercial 5G network of AIS and used ZTE’s commercial 5G gNodeB and core network equipment.
Prototype terminals with UE Aggregation functionality were provided by MediaTek. The testing scenarios were all mimicked real scenarios and compared single device performance with UE Aggregation.
The conclusion from the demonstration was quite stricking, one could observe that the uplink speed was tripled for cell-edge users when UE Aggregation was on.
In addition, the technology enabled silky smooth and consistently stable 4K live video streaming via mobile devices, even under conditions in which single devices were plagued with constant stuttering and frame drops.
Mr. Wasit Wattanasap, Head of Nationwide Network Operations & Support at AIS, applauded UE Aggregation as a “key leap forward to drive 5G-A uplink services,” with its potential to revolutionize live media, Extended Reality (XR) and industrial use cases.
Dr. HC Hwang, general manager of Wireless Communication Systems and Partnerships MediaTek said that the company aims to continue investing and focusing on the newest connectivity technology, asserting that UE Aggregation would be key in enabling a “smarter and more connected device ecosystem”.
ZTE’s deputy general manager of RAN product marketing Chao Xiong described the trial as “further evidence of UE Aggregation’s readiness” and the ability to deliver a “scalable device collaboration model in [the] next gen network environment.”
The successful demo is a strong proof point of 5G-A’s ability to enable new and better user experiences. The next versions of UE Aggregation (3GPP Releases 19 and 20) will bring further improvements through multi-path multi-relay efficient routing, in detection intelligence of low-latency paths.
This evolution will establish a strong base for enhanced use cases in the industrial IoT, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, and immersive XR experiences. “Working with ZTE and AIS on these groundbreaking achievements has been an incredible experience and a growing partnership that we are proud to play a key role in.