3 days ago
ZTE, AIS and MediaTek jointly unveil UE aggregation technology, advancing 5G-A to new heights
BANGKOK, May 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- ZTE Corporation ( / a global leading provider of integrated information and communication technology solutions, in collaboration with Thailand's leading mobile operator AIS and MediaTek, hosted a live demonstration of 5G-A UE Aggregation at the A-Z Innovation Center in Bangkok.
With the growing popularity of applications such as extended reality (XR), 4K live broadcasting, and immersive metaverse experiences, single user equipment (UE) faces inherent limitations in power, spectrum, and channel capacity. UE Aggregation offers a compelling solution by enabling Remote UEs to collaborate with nearby Relay UEs. Relay UEs can contribute their spare resources to enhance the uplink performance of Remote UEs, effectively breaking through the bottlenecks of single-device capabilities.
UE Aggregation integrates three key dimensions of cooperation to create a robust and efficient uplink transmission chain:
The live trial was conducted in A-Z center lab based on AIS commercial 5G network configuration, using ZTE's 5G gNodeB and core network equipment. MediaTek supplied prototype terminals equipped with UE Aggregation capabilities. Test scenarios simulated collaboration between Remote and Relay UEs, with direct comparisons to conventional single-device setups.
Performance was evaluated based on wireless uplink throughput and real-time 4K video streaming from mobile devices, achieving following results:
UE Aggregation has been incorporated into the 3GPP Release 18 specifications and will continue to evolve in future releases (Releases 19 and 20). Future iterations will support multi-path routing, multi-relay architecture, inter-DU/CU coordination, and intelligent low-latency path optimization—laying a strong foundation for future use cases in industrial IoT, vehicle-to-everything (V2X), and XR.
