[Shanghai, May 20, 2022] On this year’s World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, China Mobile Shanghai (Shanghai Mobile) and Huawei released the result of their verification of China Mobile’s 5G network slicing-based cloud phones. The result shows that with 5G slices, China Mobile’s cloud phones can deliver optimal experience in multiple respects like bandwidth, latency, and jitter.

The 5G slicing-based cloud phone can benefit various application scenarios. For business people, it can be used as a phone dedicated for business services, isolating work data and personal data. On top of that, the data on the cloud is secured using high-security isolation technologies. For small and micro enterprise owners, for example, an online-store owner, they can use multiple virtual cloud phones to efficiently manage their business at low cost. For game players, cloud phones can provide optimal gaming experience due to their high-computing and high-storage capabilities. For users who need assistance, cloud phones provide features to enable others to remotely guide the user while using the cloud phone, making digital more accessible to more people. In addition, the cloud phone can also be used for remote office. It enables multi-person interaction on one screen, which makes working together more efficient.

Shanghai Mobile and Huawei carried out the verification leveraging the readily available 5G system in Shanghai. In the test environment, E2E slicing capabilities were verified as service flow runs through the UE supporting route selection policy (URSP), wireless network, transport network, and core network. With the capabilities of network slicing, the 5G cloud phone can deliver optimal network service experience to end users.

By using slices, the network experience is guaranteed even during peak hours: The device-pipe-cloud round-trip time (RTT) is less than 200 ms, the network latency is below 50 ms, and the bandwidth is increased from 4 Mbit/s to over 10 Mbit/s, achieving zero frame freezing for cloud phone services. Overall, the usage experience is improved by about 50%, with the mean opinion score (MOS) being about 4.5.

In addition to slicing-based service assurance, the network data analysis function (NWDAF) is also integrated into the network and tested. As an intelligent service awareness engine, the NWDAF senses user experience, analyzes the network condition, and automatically optimizes the network; it enables network resources to be utilized and managed more efficiently, achieving intelligent scheduling of 5G cloud phone slices.

This verification is the industry’s first to verify 5G slicing-based cloud phones with NWDAF and URSP before they are put to commercial use. It demonstrated that Shanghai Mobile and Huawei can provide guaranteed SLA for 5G cloud phones, laying a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use of these new types of phones.