On July 18, during the 2022 Huawei Win-Win Innovation Week, Wang Tao, Huawei’s Executive Director and Director of the ICT Infrastructure Business Management Committee, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Continuous Innovation, Fully Moving Towards the 5.5G Era”, proposing the concept of “fully moving towards the 5.5G era”.
Mobile communication technology is developing rapidly, and 5G is a prime example. 5.5G is now coming into focus.
The emergence of 5.5G is inevitable. The so-called 5.5G is a transitional product between 5G and 6G, or 5G advance. In fact, similar products appeared in the previous 3G and 4G eras, such as H+ and LTE.
So what are the differences between 5.5G and 5G?
Internet speeds are improved, with user experience reaching 10Gbps. Wider spectrum, higher spectrum efficiency, and advanced MMO technology enable a 10Gbps experience.
Application scenarios have been enriched. With the help of 5.5G, wireless sensing, and fiber optic sensing technologies, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and environmental monitoring will become possible.
In addition to the original "triangle capabilities" of 5G—enhanced mobile bandwidth, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive machine-type communication—5.5G adds uplink ultra-wideband, broadband real-time interaction, and communication sensing fusion capabilities, expanding the original three standard scenarios of 5G into a more powerful "hexagon," which both enhances old scenarios and expands new ones.
This is expected to accelerate the commercialization of autonomous driving.
Currently, the development of intelligent vehicles is progressing rapidly, and the demand for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing daily. The high speed and low latency of 5.5G can meet the application scenarios of V2X and IoT, such as autonomous driving and low-altitude logistics drones. Autonomous vehicles face numerous traffic participants and need to make decisions and judgments in a short time, thus requiring high speed of information transmission. From this perspective, 5.5G is expected to increase the safety factor of autonomous driving and accelerate its commercialization. "Compared to the basic version of 5G, 5.5G is expected to ultimately achieve more than 10 times the network capability enhancement," Wang Tao predicted. He anticipates that in the future, 5.5G networks will be able to support more IoT devices, ultimately supporting over a hundred billion connections.
Helping to achieve dual carbon goals
5.5G, also known as green 5G, can reduce energy consumption through intelligent energy-saving technologies, new materials and new energy technologies, and new network architectures. It empowers various industries to achieve low-carbon and energy-saving practices across the entire industrial chain, helps achieve the country's "dual carbon" goals, and contributes to my country's energy conservation and environmental protection efforts.
Three new application scenarios
According to Huawei's 5.5G vision, the three new application scenarios extended by 5.5G—Ultra-wideband uplink (UCBC), real-time broadband communication (RTBC), and communication-aware fusion (HCS)—will further explore the core value of 5G technology.
Currently, China's 5G network still faces many challenges, such as fast downlink speeds but slow uplink speeds. While downlink speeds are indeed more important than uplink speeds for consumer-facing 4G and 5G networks, uplink speeds are more critical for various industries. The UCBC scenario will enhance 5G uplink capabilities, expanding bandwidth by at least 40 times compared to existing systems, meeting the upload demands of machine vision, massive broadband IoT, and other applications in enterprise manufacturing and other scenarios.
What changes has 5.5G brought? First, network capabilities have been upgraded from telecom-grade to industrial-grade, and network latency has been reduced to the microsecond level, meeting the extremely low latency requirements for industrial robot control, while network availability meets the high reliability requirements of high-frequency power grid dispatch. Second, it extends from optical communication to optical sensing, using fiber optic scattering effects to sense vibration, stress, and temperature with meter-level accuracy. Third, by utilizing the low-energy consumption characteristics of optical technology, network energy efficiency has been improved by 10 times.
RTBC scenarios will support high bandwidth and low interaction latency, with bandwidth increasing tenfold for a given latency. This will provide broader development conditions for immersive experiences when interacting with the virtual world, such as XR Pro and holographic applications.
HCS scenarios support the fusion of communication and perception, providing centimeter-level high-precision, low-power indoor positioning services. In the next 10 years, autonomous driving will increasingly become a part of people's lives, but achieving Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving requires vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, which necessitates that the network not only provide connectivity but also perception capabilities. Therefore, the fusion of communication and perception becomes particularly important.
Of course, these are currently development goals. Wang Tao stated that realizing these visions requires the joint efforts of the entire society and numerous companies, including component suppliers, equipment providers, operators, and industry organizations. In June 2022, China Mobile, together with 66 industry partners, released the world's first batch of 5G-Advanced end-to-end industry models and the "5G-Advanced New Capabilities and Industrial Development White Paper." This marks the deep integration of the innovation chain and the industrial chain, propelling 5G-Advanced into the industrial construction stage, and also signifies the imminent arrival of the 5.5G era.
