Ericsson says it has demonstrated communication with a moving vehicle at 7Gbps using prototype 5G technology and, separately, it has announced what it says is a 'world first' demonstration of 5G network infrastructure implemented using software defined networking.
The moving vehicle communication demo took place near Ericsson's HQ in Stockholm and, Ericsson says, used the same radio access equipment, known as Ericsson 5G Radio Prototypes, that is being used in mobile operators' 5G field trials.
'The Ericsson 5G Radio Prototypes used the new 5G radio interface called NR (New Radio) together with Massive MIM,' Ericsson said. 'Massive MIMO is the combination of MIMO and beamforming with a large number of antenna elements. Massive MIMO improves the user experience, through higher throughput, but also increases the coverage, capacity and energy efficiency of the mobile network.'
The demonstration of Software-Defined Telecommunications Infrastructure (SDTI) was undertaken with Korean telco, SK Telecom. It used Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System (HDS) 8000 that is based on Intel Rack Scale Architecture.
With SDTI network components such as CPU, memory and storage are disaggregated as customizable modules. As a result, they can be dynamically composed to meet the scale requirements of various 5G services, while enabling high-quality user experiences, faster service rollout and increased efficiency, according to Ericsson.
'SDTI is a key enabler of 5G network slicing, whereby a virtualized network is created and optimized for a particular user or service. The demonstration focused on two use cases - ultra-micro-network end-to-end (E2E) slicing for personalized services, and ultra-large-network E2E slicing for high-capacity processing,' Ericsson said.