It has pulled out all the stops in terms of standards formulation, R&D, and validation of 5G technologies

ZTE Corp. was early in identifying the opportunities opened by 5G and on developing a 5G strategy, as commercial deployments of 5th generation mobile networks, more widely known as 5G, approaches.

With a focus on 5G end-to-end solutions, the company has pulled out all the stops in terms of standards formulation, R&D, and validation of 5G technologies, in a move to establish industry leadership in the core technologies, the commercialization and the economies of scale for the next generation of mobile networks.

ZTE has placed a strong bet on 5G and has backed up that bet with a team of more than 4,500 high-tech talents devoted to 5G research backed by an annual investment of three billion yuan.

In addition to taking the lead in promoting massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology, which will be key to significantly improving spectrum efficiency as well as expanding network capacity and coverage in the 5G era, ZTE was the first to apply 5G technology on a 4G network, enabling commercial 5G deployments ahead of schedule and improving the spectrum efficiency of the 4G network by a factor of eight.

The early moves have helped both operators and users benefit from 5G technology, while accelerating progress of Massive MIMO deployments amid continuous innovation, in addition to contributing technology proposals including test data results to 5G standards.

In order to meet the requirement for massive network access across 5G networks, industry-wide non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been proposed, with the Multi User Shared Access (MUSA) solution, the one proposed by ZTE, being the selected candidate. The solution enables the system to support 3-6 times of number of user accesses using the same time-frequency resources, allowing for genuinely conflict-free scheduling and greatly reducing terminal power consumption.

In China's second phase of 5G testing, the MUSA technology achieved a performance of 90 million connections/MHz/hour, far exceeding the benchmark defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Because of the originality of the leading edge MUSA technology, ZTE, as the first drafter, led the adoption of NOMA by the 3GPP RAN Working Group 1, the group responsible for the specification of the physical layer of the radio interface (radio layer 1) for 5G New Radio (NR), driving the development of industrial standards.

At the same time, with strong chip design and development ability, ZTE launched the industry's highest integrated next generation baseband unit (NG BBU) based on a proprietary high-performance vector processing baseband chip developed in-house, and followed with the development of the industry's lightest and smallest 5G active antenna unit (AAU) based on a highly integrated digital IF chip.

In China's first and second phase of 5G testing, ZTE's 5G base station not only fulfilled the basic requirements, but also completed the 26 GHz high-frequency field test, with outstanding void performance results. Today, ZTE launched China's third phase of 5G testing with a full range of 5G products, and completed the roll out of equipment to the market and end-to-end debugging of commercial solutions.