Factories, refineries, corporate campuses, and other facilities generate petabytes of data, a trove of information that can be harnessed to fine-tune production, improve safety or enhance the bottom line.
Unfortunately, most of the time they cannot get at it. Only 1 in 36,000 pumps deployed worldwide—a category of equipment that some experts say consumes 10% of the electricity generated on the planet—can deliver the data they generate to a person or software application, according to a 2019 equipment census from Omdia analyst Alex West. Fewer than 5% of electric motors, a frequent culprit in costly unplanned production shutdowns, can likewise serve data across networks.
You think we live in a connected world? Guess again.
Classification of wireless Basestation deployment scenarios
Sunsea AIoT Technology Co., Ltd. is at the forefront of bridging this gap. An early pioneer in IoT with over $640 million in annual revenue, Sunsea recently debuted the Feixin 5G Cloud Small Cell, China’s first Arm-based 5G cloud base station. Developed with support from Arm China, the Feixin 5G Cloud Small Cell allows commercial users, carriers, or service providers to effectively spin up reconfigurable, high-speed, high-bandwidth local clouds linking people to their sprawling network of equipment and devices. The base station complements an extension hub. The protocol stack and interfaces of the base station and extension hub fully support the O-RAN standard definitions.
A critical element of the design—and a key difference between the 5G Feixin base station and a traditional telecommunications base station—is flexibility. Owners or operators can add or change software services at will and handle the changing requirements of the organization similar to the way applications can be added to Arm Neoverse servers. Typically, traditional base stations are relatively fixed function devices where hardware and software are inextricably tied together. As a result, traditional equipment typically cannot easily accommodate new devices or use cases, resulting in stranded data and stalled digital transformation initiatives.
A manufacturing engineer at a pharmaceutical firm, for instance, could use the Feixin to stream data from disparate production lines to a centralized asset performance management platform while a compliance officer could track air and wastewater discharges in real time to prevent violations. Virtualization and network slicing, standard features for 5G, could be employed to prioritize applications, manage access and improve security.
Or imagine a stadium with thousands fans and hundreds of behind-the-scenes employees. Local 5G could deliver AR experiences to fans, precisely monitor the power consumption of independent vendors for precise billing and share AI-generated forecasts about traffic flow, noise levels and wastewater use with city officials to ensure a smoother experience for everyone in the vicinity.
Feixin Base station v1.0 overview
“Sunsea AIoT is committed to providing telecom operators and industry users with an agile and customizable network infrastructure which takes full advantage of Arm IP’s low power consumption, cost efficiency, and improved performance,” said Wang Zhengyu, General Manager of Sunsea AIoT. “When combined with Sunsea AIoT’s strengths in AI Internet of Things, Sunsea AIoT helps telecom operators build professional 5G networks tailored to industry requirements, while simultaneously boosting 5G new infrastructure and a healthy 5G network ecosystem.”
Based on the reliable RAN architecture, the Feixin 5G Cloud Small Cell is built around a CPU from Phytium(a semiconductor company in China), a hardware accelerator, and a radio frequency unit. The protocol layer and part of the physical layer run on the server, while the acceleration and front-haul functions of the physical layer run on the hardware accelerator. The entire system consumes a maximum 250W power consumption, lower than conventional equipment while delivering the lower latency of 5G. Moreover, the integrated trust encryption platform of the Arm-based Phytium CPU enhances user information security.
The Feixin 5G Cloud Small Cell is ready for laboratory testing with telecom operators.
The Arm Neoverse platform provides flexible IP solutions and rich software and tool support for a broad range of use cases in 5G wireless networks and data centers. Arm is committed to working closely with partners to promote the development and commercial deployment of Arm-based 5G cloud network products and the cloud network ecosystem.
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