Huawei GigaGear Promises to Kick Mobile AI Up a Gear

Huawei has launched GigaGear, the world’s first 5G/5.5G experience accelerator. This solution features the convergence of software and hardware, speeding up new real-time services such as New Calling, live streams, robotaxis, and human-like AI agents that the mobile industry sees as key to significantly boosting Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and network resource utilization.

“The rapid progress in Mobile AI, live streaming, and AI robot services necessitates the adoption of more economical, reliable, and elastic mobile networks,” said Fang Xiang, Vice President of Huawei Wireless Network Product Line, speaking at the Shanghai JinQiao Innovative Center launch event.

GigaGear, with its enabling technologies like Pooling and OptSolver, both of which represent industry firsts, consolidates all air interface resources into a single cell, thereby enhancing network operation efficiency. It achieves a unified network for all terminals and services, ensuring that all 4G/5G/5.5G terminals can enjoy maximum capabilities and that all connected services can provide an optimal experience through the economical use of Air Interface Resources (AIR). The outcome is an ’all in one，one for all’ philosophy, and GigaGear is poised to usher in a new era of mobile software-defined elastic networks.

GigaGear addresses these challenges through three technical breakthroughs:

Air Interface Resources (AIR) Pooling: For the first time, soft bus technology consolidates all cell resources into a single pool, facilitating unified management and enabling real-time orchestration and scheduling of resources. This ’one cell management’ with intelligent orchestration streamlines the on-demand arrangement of resource blocks, significantly reducing internal signaling interactions and enhancing spectrum utilization by 30%. At the same time, this technology makes the most of the connection capabilities on all devices, highlighting the potential of device-defined networks.

Mobile OptSolver: OptSolver is the industry’s first solver to feature an advanced mathematical optimization engine, enhancing decision-making regarding the allocation of time, power, spectrum, and beam layer resources. OptSolver’s innovative, dedicated AISC for tensor computing enables resource scheduling in just milliseconds across higher dimensions. It intelligently models different types of resources to allocate them based on target user experiences, thereby achieving optimal resource allocation and realizing a service-defined network.

Ultra-wideband RF Hardware: The new PA (Power Amplifier) and filter hardware leverage fragmental spectrum to virtually create a larger bandwidth. This enables all available licensed spectrum to be aligned with operations at physical sites. With all resources in one room and a unified hardware architecture, spectral efficiency can be improved by over 30%.

With these three technological breakthroughs, GigaGear promises tangible performance improvements. In China, operators are pooling Sub-3GHz networks with GigaGear, which has increased uplink and downlink speeds by 40% and 20%, respectively. These performance improvements have been verified in Huawei’s labs through tests conducted on Sub-3GHz spectrum.

The development of 5G is progressing rapidly. By the end of August 2024, the number of 5G users had exceeded 1.6 billion, with 20% of networks having commercially launched standalone (SA) networks. At this pivotal moment, GigaGear will assist operators in significantly improving the utilization of their valuable Sub-3GHz spectrum. This will facilitate a smoother transition from 4G to 5G and lay a robust foundation for the evolution to 5.5G.