**: Flying Elephant Network.
With R-18 expected to freeze in early 2024, 5G-A has entered the commercial sprint stage. China Unicom has been accelerating the evolution of 5G-A technology and large-scale innovative applications. During MWC2024, China Unicom released the top ten innovative demonstration achievements of 5G-A, showing China Unicom's passive IoT innovation ideas to the industry in combination with application cases.
5G-A will open up a new space for "100 billion IoT", and passive IoT technology is a "golden key" to open the 100 billion market. With the in-depth integration of IoT technology with various industries, the scale of IoT connectivity is growing rapidly. At the end of 2020, the number of global IoT connections surpassed the number of "Internet of people" connections, including smartphones and tablets, for the first time, reaching 11.3 billion. According to a report by IoT Analytics, a market research firm, the number of global IoT connections grew by 18% to 14.3 billion in 2022. In the past 10 years, reducing the power consumption of terminal nodes has been one of the core research directions of the Internet of Things, and most of the existing low-power IoT technologies need to be powered by batteries, and the battery consumption of tens of billions of connections does not meet the requirements of green and low-carbon development, and 5G-A P-IoT technology is an effective means to solve these needs.
5G-A passive IoT (P-IoT) technology is an IoT capability generated on cellular communication base stations, which has the advantages of low cost, maintenance-free, wide applicability, and green and low-carbon. Through technological innovations such as flexible networking, simultaneous interpretation of data and energy, massive access, and low-cost converged positioning, it supports automatic inventory and sensor data collection and reporting.
5G-A passive IoT can support the application of multi-industry scenarios such as digital management of production materials in the industrial field and inventory management of pledged materials in the financial field to improve work efficiency. China Unicom Shanghai Branch and Ou Metallurgical Services took the lead in realizing the pilot implementation of 5G-A passive IoT application in the steel supervision warehouse. The pilot warehouse covers an area of 8,400 square meters and needs to supervise about 8,000 steel coils per year. By deploying a 5G-A passive IoT network in the warehouse, the warehouse supervision area is covered by the signal, and the P-IoT tag is installed on the supervision coil, so that the tag can obtain energy from the radio frequency signal sent by the base station and the environment for label power supply, and upload the perception data to the background based on the cellular network.
The application of 5G-A passive IoT technology greatly improves the work efficiency of steel supervision silos and reduces production costs. The P-IoT network supports continuous networking coverage and 24/7 automatic inventory, improving the inventory accuracy to 99%, and P-IoT tags are low-power, low-cost and maintenance-free. The application of this case shows that P-IoT can realize the automatic real-time supervision of movable assets such as steel coils in the warehouse, the dynamic refresh of warehousing information and the reporting of inventory updates to the movable property pledge supervision platform.
In addition, 5G-A passive IoT technology can also help realize real-time tracking of wide-area logistics vehicles, remote inspection of equipment, and anti-loss and anti-theft of valuable assets. For example, China Unicom and Hainan Free Trade Port have attached P-IoT labels to the duty-free goods under key supervision in the logistics warehouse, and through the 5G-A passive IoT technology and customs warehousing application platform, relying on the base station to carry out real-time location tracking of large goods, and through inter-station collaboration, it supports real-time information collection of multiple goods in the transportation process, which is more than 20 times more efficient than the traditional way, realizes end-to-end logistics tracking, and creates conditions for efficient logistics scheduling.
The successful application of 5G-A passive IoT technology fully demonstrates that passive IoT can realize the transparent visualization of various industrial production factors such as people, things, and vehicles, and improve the efficiency and safety factor of production management. In the future, China Unicom will continue to lead the promotion of 5G-A technology innovation and commercialization, inject new momentum into the development of the digital economy with increasingly mature 5G-A technology, and create new value for individuals, industries and society.