Introduction to 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) Devices

Back in 2019, we wrote about Release-17 study item called NR-Lite (a.k.a. NR-Light). After the study started, it was renamed as RedCap or Reduced Capability.

5G NR-RedCap (New Radio Reduced Capability Device) is now the official name of NR-Light (or NR-Lite before that). Assuming this was also being discussed in 3GPP as NR-RedCom (New Radio Reduced Complexity Device) earlier. Can anyone confirm 🤔 pic.twitter.com/WZUaJSgQ8s

— 3G4G (@3g4gUK) December 20, 2020

We have now made a video tutorial on RedCap to not only explain what it is but also discuss some of the enhancements being discussed for 3GPP Release-18 (5G-Advanced). For anyone wanting to find out the differences between the baseline 5G devices with RedCap, without wanting to go too much in detail, can see the Tweet image for comparison.

What is 5G reduced capability (RedCap) NR and what will it achieve? - https://t.co/NwWE9bpzVy via @EricssonNetwork @EricssonLabs #Free5Gtraining #3G4G5G #Ericsson #3GPP #5G #5GNR #eMBB #mMTC #URLLC #NRRedCap #RedCap #IoT #NRLight #NRLite #WearableTech #SmartIoT pic.twitter.com/5FbGx9lt5s

— Free 5G Training (@5Gtraining) April 25, 2021

The video and the slides of the tutorial are embedded below:

Beginners: Introduction to 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) Devices from 3G4G

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AT&T Cybersecurity Experts Provide 5G Security Overview

The National Governors Association (NGA) in the USA is the voice of the leaders of 55 states, territories, and commonwealths. On May 24th, the Resource Center for State Cybersecurity featured a panel of experts from AT&T for a conversation on understanding the 5G ecosystem, security risks, supply chain resilience and the challenges and opportunities that exist around deployment.

The talk highlighted top 5G security areas of concern. The top three being:

• Increased attack surface due to massive increase in connectivity
• Greater number & variety of devices accessing the network
• Complexity of extending security policy to new types of non-traditional and IoT devices

Some of the Security Advantages with 5G are highlighted as follows:

• Software Defined Networking/Virtualization
• Stronger 3GPP encryption for over-the-air encryption
• Subscriber Identity Privacy
• Roaming or network-to-network protection
• Network Slicing

The slides of the talk is available here and the video is as follows:

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The History of Camera Phones

Last year, Professor Nigel Linge Director of the Computer Science, Networking and Mathematics Directorate and Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Salford, Manchester presented a talk at IET, titled "Nobody saw it coming - the rise and rise of the camera-phone ". 

The following is the summary of the talk from the flyer (can't find link):

When you buy a new smartphone, what features do you look for? It is probably a safe bet that its ability to make and receive phone calls is well down the list, if on it at all! Yet the quality of the camera is probably near the top. How ironic that a technology that began life as a mobile telephone is now marketed and sold based on everything else it can do. This webinar will examine the extraordinary rise and rise of the camera-phone, from the Sharp J-SHO4 in 2000, to pushing the megapixel count up from one in 2004 to five in 2006, and then eight in 2008 to today's one-hundred plus megapixel, 4K HD video recording, multi-camera, offerings. From the first selfies, to transforming social media and turning everyone into an on-the-spot news reporter, the camera-phone has had a phenomenal impact on society in its first twenty years.

I definitely recommend watching the video, it's available on the IET page here.

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Different Types of RAN Architectures - Distributed, Centralized & Cloud

I come across a question relating to the different type of RAN architectures once per month on an average. Even though we have covered the topic as part of some or the other tutorial, we decided to do a dedicated tutorial on this.

The video and slides are embedded below

Beginners: Different Types of RAN Architectures - Distributed, Centralized & Cloud from 3G4G

As always, feedback and comments welcome.

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