ZTE Deploys 5G CampSite to Guarantee Emergency Communications in Earthquake-Stricken Areas of Sichuan

At 12: 52 local time on September 5, 2022, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit Luding County in Ganzi Prefecture, Sichuan province, causing damage to communication facilities in several areas of Shimian County, Ya'an City. Together with China Mobile Sichuan Branch, ZTE immediately delivered 5G CampSite to Shimian County, rapidly providing 4G/5G emergency network coverage for the command center and temporary shelters. The emergency communication system deployed in this project includes 5G CampSite, rescue mobile phones, flexible backhaul and edge computing engine, providing all-round emergency communications services. The 5G CampSite is a small 5G+ cloud base station together developed by ZTE and China Mobile. It features 7/24-hour plug-and-play, low latency, and wide coverage with support for the access of both public network users and private network services.

In the disaster-stricken areas in Xinmin Town of Shiman County, the situation was extremely complicated with concentrated residents and dense rescue teams. There was a need to implement on-site survey, rescue operations, and emergency communications, and also to provide phone and Internet services for the disaster-stricken people. However, most public network facilities had been out of service or even damaged, resulting in communication failures. Within only one hour after arriving at the area, the 5G CampSite started to run to guarantee emergency communications. Due to the powerful integrated RF antenna equipment, CampSite provides the affected people with 4G/5G multi-frequency multi-system capacity.

Meanwhile, the on-site technical engineers from ZTE interconnected the built-in edge computing engine of the 5G CampSite with the command center to build a wireless rescue private network. Through this convenient private network, rescue images, videos, and voice information can be shared between rescuers and the command center. Thanks to the local offloading function, the delay of video services can be reduced by 80% and the 10 Gbps processing capability is supported to greatly improve the front-line rescue progress. Compared with the traditional UPF implementation, the 5G CampSite only needs to have one NodeEngine board inserted into the BBU to provide simple and fast local private network services. This board has low power consumption and does not occupy any further supporting resources. Comparatively, the traditional UPF+MEC solution needs at least three servers, two switches, and two firewalls, with its power consumption reaching more than 3 kW. Such equipment-intensive mode of UPF can be hardly used in the emergency rescue scenarios.

As rescue was moving forwards, it was necessary to move the command center from Xinmin Town to the front line, but large emergency communication vehicles can not reach there. On-site engineers immediately deployed a wireless multi-level cascading solution, which flexibly uses multiple 5G CampSites to extend the coverage of the private network and to guarantee the front-line rescue operations in a harsh environment.

5G CampSite consists of four parts: 5G RF module, backhaul unit, edge computing engine, and auxiliary equipment (Fig. 1). The RF module uses mature commercial lightweight RF units to provide 4G/5G signal coverage in multiple possible scenarios. The backhaul unit is responsible for the interconnection between CampSite and the core network. The edge computing engine, the core of CampSite, is embedded in the BBU to provide the local traffic offloading function at the BTS level, which saves transmission resources and significantly reduces the delay. The auxiliary equipment provides a convenient movable condition for the whole CampSite.

This is the first time that 5G CampSite has been put into the rescue operations. It provided reliable and timely communication services for the rescuers and the disaster-stricken people with the following advantages:

• Quick deployment: 5G CampSite can be deployed quickly and flexibly without site survey. The integrated mobile cart solves the problems of inconvenient movement of equipment and site selection difficulties. It only takes about 20 minutes from deployment to up and running. In addition, 5G CampSite also supports multiple backhaul modes such as dedicated line, wireless CPE relay, Internet, and satellite backhaul to support rapid deployment in many scenarios.
• Three-dimensional coverage: An AAU equipment that integrates an RF unit and an antenna unit can be adopted for 5G CampSite. The AAU is small in size, light in weight, and compact in structure. In addition, the AAU uses a universal hardware platform, supports 4G/5G dual-mode, and can flexibly configure 4G/5G cells through software, providing multi-frequency multi-mode coverage in disaster-stricken areas.
• Powerful edge computing engine: In addition to meeting public service requirements, the built-in edge computing engine of CampSite also supports local traffic offloading. After being filtered by CampSite, the upcoming private services were interconnected with the local command center via the edge computing engine to build a wireless rescue private network that enables the sharing of text, voice, pictures, and videos between on-site rescuers and command centers. CampSite can also support advanced functions such as high-altitude lighting, drone search and rescue, and infrared detection.

In the face of the disaster, ZTE and China Mobile Sichuan Branch quickly coordinated the emergency, transmission, power, and satellite systems, and rapidly commissioned the 5G CampSite to solve the network coverage and capacity problems for the residential shelters while meeting the private network service needs of the rescuers, providing strong support for rescue work.