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Monday, August 9, 2021

Qualcomm Demoes Sub-band Half Duplex (SBHD)


Qualcomm has been busy promoting its advanced 5G solutions these last few months in the run up to Mobile World Congress (MWC). You can find a detailed write-up on their website here as well as a feature which they did with RCR wireless here.

One of the innovations that caught my attention was Sub-band Half-Duplex (SBHD). In the first glance it looks like the Enhanced Interference Mitigation & Traffic Adaptation (eIMTA) solution we discussed long back here.

Their article talks about how their 5G multi-cell over-the-air (OTA) test network can now support subband half-duplex, allowing for more flexible service multiplexing as well as improved latency and coverage. 

While you can get an idea of what SBHD is from the diagram above, here is a video explaining it further.

Let us know what do you think about how important will this feature be in future 5G networks.

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2 comments:

  1. I see that one area of ​​the spectrum is dedicated to the UL and another to the DL, so I don't understand the benefit of being half duplex. I suppose that there are no guard bands and that is why full duplex transmission is not allowed, though this is weird since one would expect inter link interference on the boundary between cells (downlink of cell-1 edge UE interferred by UL of cell-2 edge UE)... Anyways, there is a loss of efficiency... We would have to calculate what is more efficient, if leaving guard bands or a half duplex transmission. Or maybe there is some detail that I have not understood well...

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  2. This is TDD only, so on a high level helps with ( or fix ) TDD implementation of cell edges problem. But doesn't really benefits FDD usage which is used world wide. Or are we going to switch over to TDD, which seems logical but I dont see how frequency spectrum currently being allocated to be use without some sort of government regulation changes.

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