The Brooklyn 5G Summit and the road to 5G mobile networks

Last week, I have attended (remotely) the Brooklyn 5G Summit (April 20-21). It was an amazing event and interesting opportunity to see the research trends in the area of telecommunications and more precisely mobile communications and it was a real occasion to understand the viewpoint of each stockholder in the telecom market and the prototypes they are developing in their R&D labs for the future 5G manufacturing.

According to Ericsson ConsumerLab statistics during 2015, only 43% of consumers were satisfied with their indoor connectivity experience when browsing and accessing social networks and even more less (13%) are satisfied with their outdoor connectivity for the same kind of applications. Data-intensive activities like streaming and TV has followed the same tendency, 34% of consumer satisfaction for indoor experience and only 10% in the outdoor context. These concrete measurements show that the network performance is a serious bottleneck for telecom industry and is going to be a factor of paramount interest for the community and consumer engagement during the coming years.

The fifth generation of mobile networks tries to meet these requirements by identifying three types of services and use cases: mission critical control, enhanced mobile broadband and massive internet of things. Mission critical control represents the ultra-high reliable low latency communications (URLLC), scenarios pertaining to enhanced mobile broadband or eMBB communications need extreme capacity (coverage) and higher data rates and massive internet of things (mIoT) impose tight constraints in terms of low energy consumption and complexity as they characterize the machine type communications.

It is widely known that each decade experiences the emergence of a new generation of mobile services. From the birth of the first generation during 1980s to the in progress fourth generation, it is commonly believed that 5G will be soon a reality. The initial project plan for 5G New Radio (NR) was allowing standard-compliant 5G deployment around 2020 according to the following phasing:

• Phase 1: to be completed by Sep 2018/Rel-15 to address a more urgent subset of the commercial needs.
• Phase 2: to be completed by Mar 2020/Rel-16 for the IMT 2020 submission and to address all identified use cases and requirements.

Nevertheless, the promise of high-bandwidth and low-latency wireless applications with the ability to deliver rich contents whenever and wherever the consumer wants has placed unprecedented stress to accelerate the 3GPP 5G NR schedule.  Users keep increasing their data consumption. As a result, a group of industry players used the recent Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona (27 Feb - 2 Mar) to highlight an update to the 5G roadmap (agreed later by 3GPP). An earlier intermediate milestone called Non-Standalone 5G NR has been introduced to get the large-scale trials and deployments starting one year before the expected deadline (by early 2019). Non-Standalone 5G NR will utilize the existing LTE radio and evolved packet core network as an anchor for mobility management and coverage while adding a new 5G radio access carrier (completion by December 2017).  The final standard, Standalone 5G NR, will have a 5G core network (completion by June 2018).

5G prototypes and trials will operate in many spectrum bands. 5G networks could run on the 3400 MHz, 3500 MHz and 3600 MHz spectrum bands. Airwaves in the sub- 6 GHz band are considered ideal for the first wave of 5G deployments to provide coverage and mobility support. Millimeter wave spectrum at 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands may also play a fundamental role in future 5G rollouts. Millimeter waves are the set of frequencies ranging between 30 and 300 GHz. These bands provide higher channel bandwidths ranging from 10s to 100s of MHz, which is suitable for multigigabit transmission support with dense deployments especially to offload indoor traffics. It is expected that 5G will natively support and be backward compatible with shared spectrum-based technologies. Hence, operators will be able to aggregate many spectrum bands opportunistically to support extreme bandwidths using a Listen-Before-Talk (LBT)-based access. For instance, 5G spectrum sharing will expand the spectrum sharing technologies introduced in LTE, namely: LTE Unlicensed (LTE-U) (by Qualcomm) and Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) (by 3GPP) that aggregate licensed spectrum with shared/unlicensed spectrum, LTE Wi-Fi Aggregation (LWA) to aggregate across technologies, MulteFire that enables high-performance cellular technology to operate stand-alone in unlicensed spectrum, Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) where multiple deployments can share spectrum with a higher prioritized incumbent, basically, the US navy and satellites. The CBRS US scheme dynamically allocates 3.5GHz spectrum on demand to anyone and a similar scheme is being developed by ETSI for use in Europe in the 2.3 GHz band. All the aforementioned paradigms have been implemented thanks to the enhanced Carrier aggregation (CA) approach, which has alleviated the network capacity crunch.

Internet of vehicles, Internet of things, ultra HD 8K video, augmented reality and many other paradigms seem to find the way to be standardized and industrialized and so I am wondering: is this the era of realizing science fiction stories?

There is a myth claiming that mobile generations with odd numbers are troubled. So will 5G be a success or an expensive fiasco (Rupert Baines' blog)? Perhaps, we should wait for 2018 Olympics trial at Korea.