China Telecom Biqi: P-RAN is expected to solve the 6G coverage problem at low cost

News on March 24 (Shuiyi) Recently, at the "Global 6G Technology Conference" hosted by the Future Mobile Communication Forum, Bi Qi, chief expert of China Telecom, Bell Labs Fellow, and IEEE Fellow, said that 6G will surpass 5G in performance by 10%. In order to achieve this goal, higher frequency spectrum must be used, and coverage will become the biggest stumbling block.

In order to solve the coverage problem, the 6G system is expected to use multi-frequency networking, ultra-large antennas, satellites, and smart reflectors to improve. At the same time, the P-RAN distributed network architecture proposed by China Telecom is also expected to become a key technology for enhancing coverage.

Bi Qi introduced that P-RAN is a distributed 6G network architecture based on a near-area network, which is a natural evolution of cellular technology. Based on P-RAN, the industry is discussing using mobile phones as base stations to solve the high cost problem caused by ultra-dense networking.

"Smartphones have a large number of CPUs that are basically idle, and their value is expected to be tapped." Biqi said that each of our smartphones is very powerful at present. If it is regarded as a terminal base station, it can be greatly improved. The reuse of radio frequencies can also form a distributed network through SDN technology. In addition, through this network, the idle CPU of the terminal can be scheduled again to form a distributed computing power network.

Bi Qi said that China Telecom has already carried out related work in the field of P-RAN, but there are also some challenges. For example, the base station is fixed in the traditional sense, and now it is necessary to consider the problem of the mobile state; frequency reuse between different devices , interference, switching; battery, power management; of course, there are security issues to be resolved.

Therefore, P-RAN needs to make innovations in physical layer architecture, system AI, blockchain, distributed computing, operating system, and on-site service standardization.

Bi Qi pointed out that P-RAN is a cost-effective 6G high-frequency coverage solution. Once successful in the ecosystem, P-RAN can improve network capabilities, and can also integrate cloud and device capabilities to bring new near field service. In addition, through the P-RAN architecture, the combination of the cellular network and the near-area network, and the development of the distributed network architecture is also a new trend of the 6G network architecture, and the cloud-network integration is further promoted to span cloud, network, edge, end-to-end computing power network.11


Post time: Mar-28-2022