Indonesia’s Telkomsel announces the successful commercial deployment of CloudAIR 2.0 solution in 2018 Mobile Word Congress (MWC 2018). This solution is the result of Telkomsel and Huawei’s Joint Innovation Center 2.0 (JIC2.0), aimed to reshape the air interface with the concept of cloudification and efficiently share the air interface resources such as spectrum, power and channel. The implementation of this solution will improve the air interface efficiency and enable operators to have more flexibility to deploy the networks and provide a better user experience.
From the verification in Telkomsel's live network, the solution increases the mobile broadband cell edge user experience significantly. The application of spectrum cloudification technology increases the LTE user downlink speed throughput by 116% from 50Mbps to 108Mbps. In addition, the implementation of channel cloudification technology improves the carrier aggregation coverage for outdoor areas by 21.4% as well as two to three times user experience improvement for indoor areas.
As the number of Telkomsel 4G subscriber grows rapidly, many of 2G subscribers will migrate to 4G. At the same time, there are many of 2G subscribers who will be remaining for a long time, making this an obvious long-tail phenomenon. Therefore, it is a big challenge for Telkomsel to maximize the spectrum efficiency in a limited spectrum by scheduling the 2G and 4G resources based on demand.
Furthermore, in order to meet the rapid development of 4G business, Telkomsel has deployed LTE technology in 2300MHz, 2100Mhz, 1800MHz and 900MHz at the same time. However, the high frequency band uplink signal becomes a coverage bottleneck due to a high propagation, a high penetration loss and a limited transmitting power of the terminal. This situation results in poor user experience at the cell edge, especially in indoor areas. Consequently, it is also challenging for Telkomsel to fully use the spectrum resources in high frequency.
In response to those issues, Telkomsel and Huawei conducted Joint Innovation Center and introduced the CloudAIR 2.0 solution, which successfully solved the problems through two technologies: spectrum cloudification (dynamic spectrum sharing) and channel cloudification.
The spectrum cloudification technology realizes the deployment of different Radio Access Technologies (RAT) in the same spectrum. This solution can dynamically allocate and adjust spectrum resources according to the changes of traffic and avoid the legacy RAT to occupy the golden spectrum in a long term to maximize the spectrum efficiency.
Meanwhile, the channel cloudification technology combines the advantage of larger downlink bandwidth of high band and better uplink coverage of low band. The high band is selected as the uplink at near point and midpoint for capacity, while the low band is selected as the uplink at cell edge to compensate the coverage limitation of high band. The coordination between LTE high band and low band channel cloudification can significantly improve the coverage of high band and improve the cell edge user experience, especially for LTE indoor coverage areas.
Director of Planning and Transformation of Telkomsel Edward Ying said, “We have been committed to the technology innovation and build the mobile broadband network to provide ultimate user experience to our subscribers. The CloudAIR 2.0 solution has enabled us to achieve a convergence of the multi band network that maximizes capacity and coverage requirements and enhances the user experience effectively. We will continue to carry out joint innovation projects with Huawei, hoping JIC3.0 to achieve a greater success.”
Dr. Peter Zhou, Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Solution said, “We are very delighted to provide an innovative solution for Telkomsel, the largest mobile network operator in Indonesia. Our focus is on improving the efficiency of air interface, enabling Telkomsel to deploy services more flexibly and, of course, enhancing the experience of Telkomsel’s millions subscribers.”
