Huawei has completed the world's first successful large-scale field trial of 5G radio access technology, a significant step in its mission to roll out 5G technologies before 2018.

Conducted with NTT Docomo, Japan's largest mobile service provider, the trial was completed in an outdoor test site in Chengdu, China.

The joint trial of 5G new radio access technologies is a key step toward accelerating 5G standardisation and commercialisation, says Huawei.

Wen Tong, Huawei Fellow and Huawei Wireless Networks CTO, says, “This joint field trial represents a significant advance toward fulfilling Huawei's commitment to developing 5G technology standards before 2018.

“Results like these show we are making rapid progress and are on the right path. I am confident that what we have learned here will be reflected in even more innovative technological advances as we continue working on 5G research.

Huawei says it plans to launch the first 5G pilot networks with its partners in 2018, and aims to contribute to the 5G industry ecosystem to complete interoperability testing in 2019, and commercially launch 5G networks in 2020.

Huawei and Docomo announced their partnership on joint trials of the new air-interface technologies for 5G in March 2015.

The current field trials are taking place at a dedicated test site in Chengdu that enables both companies to systematically verify these technologies, including MU-Mimo, F-OFDM and SCMA.

Integrating and testing the MU-Mimo, F-OFDM and SCMA as 5G new radio technologies solution is one of the key to enable higher spectrum efficiency for enhanced mobile broadband, as well as to enable the massive machine type communications and mission critical reliable communications for 5G, the company says.

In Chengdu, Huawei and Docomo were the first to complete large-scale testing of Multi-User Mino (MU-Mimo) technology, with a concurrent connectivity of 24 user devices in a macro-cell environment on a sub-6GHz frequency band.

Furthermore, this was also the first test to validate the performance of Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM) in the field, both of which are 5G new air interface technologies proposed by Huawei.

The cell average downlink throughput of MU-Mimos is 1.34Gbps, with 3.6Gbps on download peak throughput in a 100MHz ultra-wide band channel - these speeds are more than 10 times faster than single layer Single User Mimo (SU-Mimo) technology.

“As the first in the world to succeed with such a large multi-user environment test, this is an important milestone,” says Takehiro Nakamura, NTT Docomo's 5G Laboratory vice president and managing director.

“This is very encouraging as the industry works to commercialise 5G by 2020. Both Huawei and Docomo teams have made tremendous efforts.

“I look forward to even more impressive results when we move to the next phase of field trial in Japan," he says.