May 31, 2018

[London, UK, May 31, 2018] Huawei has proposed that the indoor coverage industry transition to the Indoor Digital System (IDS), which is the architecture definition of indoor digitalization. Huawei made the proposal at the 2018 Small Cell World Summit in London. IDS includes three elements: Digital Headend, IT Cable and Visualized O&M, which constitute the major differences from a traditional distributed antenna system (DAS).

A digital headend is an active antenna unit (AAU) product in which RRU and antennas are integrated into a single box. In terms of IT cables, traditional feeders for data transmission are replaced by optical fiber cables and Ethernet cables in IDS networking to facilitate project implementation. Visualized O&M allows operators to implement E2E management of network components and services, transforming networks from unmanageable to manageable to reduce maintenance workload.

Indoor digitalization has become a mainstream solution for indoor coverage. Building a 5G oriented indoor digital network based on IDS will help operators improve 4G user experience and prepare for upcoming 5G.

Small Cell Industry Partners at the 2018 SCWS

Traditional DAS-based indoor coverage solutions were initiated in the GSM era. A DAS network is mainly composed of analog and passive components, which are "Black Box" and don’t allow operators to manage the network. All components are highly frequency band specific, and signal loss over cables is much higher as higher frequency bands, such as 3.5 GHz, are set to be massively used.

The transition of indoor coverage from DAS to IDS is taking place across all industries. Operators, tower companies, and analysts all understand that indoor coverage solutions are developing rapidly and jointly voice preference for IDS over DAS due to clear advantages in bettering MBB experience, lowering engineering costs, increasing O&M efficiency, and diversifying services. Digital indoor coverage solutions have already become a common choice among industries.

The LampSite Family solution is an embodiment based on the IDS architecture that adapts to diverse indoor scenarios from capacity demands to coverage needs. The solution offers the most efficient ways for operators to address coverage and user experience issues of indoor MBB services.

LampSite Family includes four products that meet the needs of indoor scenarios. LampSite Sharing is the first to allow multi-operator access, a feature needed by both neutral hosts and operators as they intend to build and share networks with multiple operators. LampSite Pro and LampSite Grid are designed for single-operator access. LampSite Pro has been proven to help operators worldwide to successfully fulfill traffic demands in high capacity scenarios such as railway stations.

A deployment case in China shows that more than 4,000 GB data traffic increased per day during China’s 2018 Spring Festival on the mobile network of a tier-1 operator. Buildings like hotels and offices do not generate traffic volume of railway stations. LampSite Grid is a new solution of Huawei’s LampSite Series to provide cost efficient indoor coverage for such buildings. In small and medium-sized scenarios, the most challenging issue to deploy base stations is the lack of wireline backhaul transmission resources. Huawei LampSite Libero innovatively supports wireless backhaul over LTE technology to make deployment as easy as using customer equipment.

Ritchie Peng, President of Huawei’s Small Cell Product Line, said: "On the path toward 5G indoor coverage, DAS is struggling with higher feeder loss over the 3.5 GHz band, inability to support MIMO and indoor location-based services. It's time now to start indoor digital coverage. Huawei’s LampSite Series solutions can adapt to various indoor scenarios and provide optimal digital solutions for operators and tower companies."