Press Releases

TOKYO, JAPAN, February 22, 2016 --- NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today that it has agreed with MediaTek of Taiwan to jointly develop and conduct trials of technology that will enable increased data capacity for the fifth-generation mobile communication system (5G) expected to be launched in Japan by 2020. The agreement expands DOCOMO's 5G collaborations to 13 world-leading vendors.

The trials, which will be conducted in either Taiwan or Japan from 2017 onwards, will develop a communication system to combine non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) wireless access technologies from DOCOMO and multi-user interference cancellation (MUIC) technologies from MediaTek. NOMA multiplexes signals at a base-station transmitter to leverage the increased signal processing capacity of a user device to cancel interference among multiplexed user signals. MUIC utilizes receiver antennas to remove interference from other users and increase capacity when a base station transmits a signal to a number of users at the same time.

The two companies will also study a new 5G Radio Access Technology and chipsets required for 5G devices, with joint trials to be carried out from 2018 onwards.

"DOCOMO is excited to work with MediaTek, an innovator with expertise in the technical requirements of 5G," said Seizo Onoe, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at DOCOMO. "The potential opportunities for 5G to enable people to connect with devices are endless. We're eager to see our 5G network inspire innovative inventions to benefit technology, life and business."

"We are pleased to collaborate with DOCOMO on developing the best possible standard as well as user terminals for 5G cellular systems," said Kevin Jou, Senior Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of MediaTek. "We plan to use our advanced signal processing and circuit technologies to design solutions that will meet the diverse and stringent requirements posed by 5G in order to ensure a successful service launch in the 2020 time frame."

DOCOMO, as part of its efforts to develop the devices required to launch a 5G service in 2020, will share the test results and proposed concepts with research organizations and international conferences to further drive 5G standardization.

DOCOMO has been collaborating on future 5G deployment with each of the 12 blue-chip vendors—Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel Corporation, Keysight Technologies, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic Corporation, Qualcomm Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz, and Samsung.

5G is expected to enable wireless communication at speeds faster than 10Gbps and data capacity that is some 1,000 times greater than that of LTE. It will also accommodate a vast increase in the number of mobile devices as the Internet of Things (IoT) spreads, as well as support a huge variety of services.