Understanding The 5G New Radio

The Telecom industry is certainly very eager to deploy 5G services with the support of ultra-
high capacity and very low latency next generation networks. But before we get too excited
and be prepared to see some commercial availability, 5G technologies do need to be
standardized. This is currently being looked after by the 3GPP. This group covers many
areas such as the inter-working of 5G with different technologies, quality of service and
many other low level technical topics. Although the main study items can be categorised
under three branches. Radio Access, Core Transport Network and Services. In this article I
will try to discuss the future outlook and look into the New Radio paradigm.

How Precise Can We Be On Predicting the Future Of 5G?

There are three major pillars we can identify today for 5G development. First is enhanced
mobile broadband (eMBB) which is expected to bring data connectivity to a whole new
level. Second is mission critical services such as latency critical communications as well as
extreme reliability apps like robots, medical technology applications. Third one is the stuff
revolving around the Internet of Things where we expect a huge density of devices with
potentially quite low data rate requirement. These are all very diverse types of applications
and 5G will be the umbrella technology that will try to cover all.

As much as we can identify the areas where we can see opportunity in 5G deployment, it is
also very difficult to predict precisely the future outlook and the shift in consumer behaviour
in a detailed and a scientific way due to the complex nature of emerging technologies.

Let’s remember when the LTE standardization work had started back in 2004. It was
certainly before the “smart phone era” and we only had predictions on how penetration
would be and what the drivers such as the video and innovative apps evolve into and push
the mobile users to consume more data. That is why we needed to be creative on putting
together the principles of the next generation technology.
The situation I reckon looks pretty similar today. We know that we would like to go to a new
level and the use cases such as the self-driving cars, autonomous transportation, medical
apps, public safety etc are pretty demanding. And we also do know there is an emerging
area of private IoT network where there will be massive connection requirement. For this
reason, the ambition of the groups like the 3GPP is to create a very efficient environment
from day-1 and cover the requirements as outlined by IMT-2020, similar to the initial phases
of 3G/4G networks.

There was also one interesting outcome from the plenary in Dubrovnik, Croatia. 3GPP have
also agreed on an item which considers the 5G operation on the unlicensed bands.

Can New Radio on Unlicensed Bring Something New To The Table?

The idea in a nutshell with 5G NR is to introduce a considerably lower cost-per-bit with new
latency levels, reliability and security. The whole architecture is being designed in a way
that it will be scaled to connect the massive number of IoT devices and offer innovative
services not only in telecoms but also in vertical sectors such as health, automotive, public
safety etc.

Let’s briefly look at what has been already decided in previous plenaries of the 3GPP. We
know that the Release 14 will be the upcoming one and will be focusing on the
enhancements such as inter-band / 4-band carrier aggregation, V2X (vehicle to everything)
services. We are expecting the functional freeze dates of these to be around June 17 which
is pretty soon. Then we also know that the Release 15 is ongoing and the work items have
already started together with the normative work for NR. This will continue until June 18.

Some initial 5G NR requirements are as below.

Because of vendors’ and operators’ appetite to have some deployment as soon as possible,
3GPP have also decided to have a non-standalone operation ready around December this
year, that will pretty much rely on LTE as a “control plane anchor” for the tasks like the
mobility management via the existing EPC. Then the standalone will follow to realize fully
the target use cases such as the eMBB and URLCC with the frequencies ranging above
and below 6 GHz.

There is a growing interest to the unlicensed spectrum and new paradigms that may come
with the NR and this is currently an open study item. The final scope of this is very broad
and still TBD. Having access to the spectrum towards the unlicensed will extend the reach
of the service within a particular geography because it will cover the bands from low to
millimetre wave.
But the problem there in the unlicensed region is that there is no arbitration whatsoever and
the utilization is far from optimal. Especially when pushed to very high loads it is extremely
inefficient as the users there are treated equally. When it is not available you simply cannot
access. While the licensed spectrum –obviously the best and the most expensive one to
have- is fully regulated and the operator has the exclusive rights of access that no one else
is allowed to get in. So the main differentiator there is the guaranteed QoS.

Between these 2 extremes there is spectrum sharing and actually it is historically not a new
thing. We can give 2.3 GHz in EU and 3.5 GHz in the US as examples to this. There are
now ways with the new paradigms and features to bring QoS also to the shared spectrum.
One interesting example as discussed in one of Qualcomm’s NR webinars by Juan Montojo
would be a type of an “vertical sharing” which would always favour the high priority operator
but at the same time allow an opportunistic access to the secondary one for the leftover
resources. Another model would be the “horizontal sharing” where everyone is same like in
the Wi-Fi but sme particular types of devices in the shared spectrum are targeted. So some
QoS considerations may be applied.

So the initial impression is that as we improve the QoS gap, with the combination of the two
models explained above and the innovative and creative approaches, shared spectrum can
actually have potential to bring something new to the table.

When combined with technologies like CoMP where all cells cooperate in the transmission
creating a joint force, the potential gain would be even more attractive. It is exciting that the
3GPP is considering NR in unlicensed spectrum and I believe it will bring wide range of
opportunities.