We made a tutorial some time back explaining how to calculate reliability and what is the difference between 5x9s in 3GPP Release-15 5G vs 6x9s in 3GPP Release-16. Slides and video below
On the 3G4G Small Cells Blog, I have written about the Autralian operator Telstra trialing small cells on Tasmania’s power poles to fix mobile black spots. This looks like a similar initiative in Japan but at a much larger scale.
TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power COmpany) Power Grid, Incorporated, KDDI CORPORATION, SoftBank Corp. and Rakuten Mobile Network, Inc. announced that the four companies have reached an agreement to collaborate on trials of base station site and equipment sharing utilizing TEPCO PG’s utility poles and other electric power infrastructure, ahead of the introduction of 5th generation mobile communications systems (5G) in Japan. The trials are due to be begin in the first half of FY2019. 5G utilizes high frequency bands in order to enable higher speeds and greater capacity. As a result, the number of base stations required for 5G is expected to be larger than for 4G. The growing number of base stations not only creates difficulties in securing installation locations, but also calls for consideration on the impact too many antennas and other equipment might have on the landscape. TEPCO PG has been working together with KDDI to explore the shared utilization of utility poles and other electric power infrastructure and base station equipment between mobile network operators, and as preparations are now complete, the companies are set to begin the trials using actual equipment. The trials, which SoftBank and Rakuten Mobile Network are also set to join, aim to verify the feasibility of location and equipment sharing between mobile network operators. Specifically, the trials will evaluate the equipment, layout, workability, serviceability and the level of radio interference resulting from sharing the antenna for base station installations on utility poles. There are also plans to expand the number of companies participating in the trials to include other organizations planning to utilize 5G in the future. Sharing utility poles among a number of mobile network operators makes it possible to flexibly build out base stations in urban areas and rapidly launch services in rural areas. It is also expected to address the issue of securing locations for base stations and lowers the impact of base station equipment on the landscape. Through the trials, TEPCO PG, KDDI, SoftBank and Rakuten Mobile Network aim to reduce the infrastructure construction costs and contribute to the smooth nationwide introduction of 5G.
The picture on the top is from KDDI press release, translated using Google Translate.
Adrian Scrase, CTO of ETSI & Head of MCC, 3GPP presented an update at BAPCO / CCE 2019 on Public Safety LTE and 5G. His presentation is embedded below.
There has been quite a progress in this area since I wrote my last post on Release-14 here.
This is the list of features that are planned for Release-16. There is also an update on Satellite communications but I will look at it separately in another post. Here are the slides:
Last October Deutsche Telekom, Niantic and MobiledgeX announced a partnership to create advanced augmented reality experiences over mobile network technologies. I was lucky to find some time to go and play it at Deutsche Telekom booth. The amount of processing needed for this to work at best also meant that the new Samsung Galaxy S10+ were needed but I felt that it also occasionally struggled with the amount of data being transferred.
Deutsche Telekom, Niantic Inc., MobiledgeX and Samsung Showcase World’s First Mobile Edge Mixed Reality Multi-Gamer Experience At the Deutsche Telekom booth at MWC 2019 (hall 3, booth 3M31) the results of the previously announced collaboration between Deutsche Telekom, Niantic, Inc., and MobiledgeX are on display and you’re invited to play. Niantic’s “Codename: Neon”, the world’s first edge-enhanced Mixed Reality Multiplayer Experience, delivered by ultra-low latency, Deutsche Telekom edge-enabled network, and Samsung Galaxy S10+ with edge computing enablement, will be playable by the public for the first time. “The ultra-low latency that Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enables, allows us to create more immersive, exciting, and entertaining gameplay experiences. At Niantic, we’ve long celebrated adventures on foot with others, and with the advent of 5G networks and devices, people around the world will be able to experience those adventures faster and better,” said Omar Téllez, Vice-President of Strategic Partnerships at Niantic. The collaboration is enabled using MobiledgeX’s recently announced MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 product. Key features include device and platform-independent SDKs, a Distributed Matching Engine (DME) and a fully multi-tenant control plane that supports zero-touch provisioning of edge cloud resources as close as possible to the users. Immediate examples of what this enables include performance boosts for Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences as well as video and image processing that meets local privacy regulations. Samsung has been working together with Deutsche Telekom, MobiledgeX, and Niantic on a natively edge-capable connectivity and authentication in Samsung Galaxy S10+ to interface with MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 and dynamically access the edge infrastructure it needs so that augmented reality and mixed reality applications can take advantage of edge unmodified. Samsung will continue such collaborations with industry-leading partners not only to embrace a native device functionality of edge discovery and usage for the mobile devices and consumers, but also to seek a way together to create new business models and revenue opportunities leading into 5G era. Deutsche Telekom’s ultra-low latency network was able to deliver on the bandwidth demands of “Codename: Neon” because it deployed MobiledgeX’s edge software services, built on dynamically managed decentralized cloudlets. “From our initial partnership agreement in October, we are thrilled to showcase the speed at which we can move from idea to experience, with full end-to-end network integration, delivered on Samsung industry leading edge native devices,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Senior Vice President Strategy and Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. From the gaming industry to industrial IoT, and computer vision applications, consumer or enterprise, the experience is a great example of interactive AR experiences coming from companies like Niantic in the near future. As AR/VR/MR immersive experiences continue to shape our expectations, devices, networks and clouds need to seamlessly and dynamically collaborate.
This video from Deutsche Telekom booth shows how the game actually feels like
Niantic CEO John Hanke delivered a keynote at Mobile World Congress 2019 (embedded below). According to Fortune article, "Why the Developer of the New 'Harry Potter' Mobile Game and 'Pokemon Go' Loves 5G":
Hanke showed a video of a prototype game Niantic has developed codenamed Neon that allows multiple people in the same place at the same time to play an augmented reality game. Players can shoot at each other, duck and dodge, and pick up virtual reality items, with each player’s phone showing them the game’s graphics superimposed on the real world. But the game depends on highly responsive wireless connections for all the phones, connections unavailable on today’s 4G LTE networks. “We’re really pushing the boundaries of what we can do on today’s networks,” Hanke said. “We need 5G to deliver the kinds of experiences that we are imagining.”
Here is the video, it's very interesting and definitely worth a watch. For those who may not know, Niantic spun out of Google in October 2015 soon after Google's announcement of its restructuring as Alphabet Inc. During the spinout, Niantic announced that Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company would invest up to $30 million in Series-A funding.
So what do you think, can AR / MR be the killer App 5G needs?
I made this video before MWC with the intention to educate the attendees about the various architecture options and 5G terminologies being discussed. As always, happy to get feedback on what can be done better. Slides followed by video below.
MWC is huge and there is absolutely no way that I even managed to cover 1% of the floor, even though I spend half a day, every day looking at the demos and talking to companies. I came across just a couple of companies looking at post 5G research. One was Mehdi Bennis, from University of Oulu and a good friend of this blog and the other one was Interdigital, which has featured heavily on 3G4G blogs too.
From the standards point of view, I am only aware of ITU 'Network 2030' (FG NET-2030) that is looking at how future network architectures, requirements, use cases, and capabilities of the networks will change by 2030 and beyond. I blogged about it here.
It's too early to call anything as 6G because we don't even realise the ways in which 5G will change the world and the limitations that will feed into the requirements of IMT-2030 (just guessing the probable name).
A more updated presentation & video on this topic is available on 3G4G '5G Training' page here.
Who thought displaying of network status icon on 5G devices would be so much fun. Typically the network icons are more of:
2G - Gsm, G, G+, E
3G - 3G, H, H+
4G - 4G, 4G+
Back in 2017, Samsung devices started displaying 4G+ icon. Samsung told mybroadband:
that by default its devices require a network to support Category 6 LTE, and for the total combined bandwidth to exceed 20MHz, before they will display the “4G+” icon. Networks in South Africa frequently don’t have over 20MHz of aggregated bandwidth available, though. As a result, one network asked Samsung to reduce the combined bandwidth requirement for the 4G+ icon to display to 15MHz, which Samsung approved. “Samsung’s global policy regarding the display of the LTE/LTE-A/4G/4G+ network icon is that the network icon display is operator-configurable upon official request and Samsung approval,” it said.
The reason this is interesting is because LTE is really 3.9G but generally called 4G. LTE-A is supposed to be 4G because in theory it meets IMT-Advanced criteria. Then we have LTE-Advanced Pro, which is known as 4.5G. While in majority of the operators display 4.5G as 4G or 4G+, couple of operators has decided to become a bit innovative.
AT&T started by updating the network icons of some of their devices to 5GE, which is their way of saying 4.5G. E stands for Evolution. Or as some people joked, it stands for economy (or value) version, as opposed to premium version.
Brazilian operator Claro, decided to use the 4.5G icon but the 5 is much larger font compared to 4 (see the pic above). Some people call this as dishonest attempt by them.
I see a few people asking how can devices decide if they are on 4G or 4.5G. There is no standard procedure for this and is UE specific. One way is to look at RRC messages. If the system information messages contain optional IE's for 3GPP Release-13, then the network supports LTE-A Pro and if the device supports the features for LTE-A Pro, it can display 4.5G or 5GE, etc. Another approach is the optional IEs present in NAS Attach Accept message. As this comes slightly later in the registration process, the device displays 4G first and once the registration is complete, 4.5G. Note there is no requirement from standards point of view about displaying of the network status indication icon up to 4G/4.5G.
With this number of System and Radio access options available, one or more new status icons are expected to appear on the User Interface of future (mobile) devices. A user should expect consistency across devices and networks as to what icons actually mean (i.e. what services might be expected when an icon is displayed). While 3GPP specifications are not expected to define or discuss Service or RAT indicators in the User Interface themselves, 3GPP should provide the necessary tools in EPS and 5GS to enable them. It is therefore necessary to understand the conditions required for displaying these icons and with which granularity so we can identify what information ought to be available in/made available to the device. SA2 understands that Status Icons related to 5G might be displayed for example on a UE display taking into account all or some combinations of these items (other items may exist): -Access Restriction Data in subscription (with the potential exception of emergency access); -UE CN registration (i.e. is UE EPC- and/or 5GC-registered?); -UE capabilities; -Network capabilities; -UE is camping on a cell of NG-RAN supporting NR only, E-UTRA only or, the ability to activate dual connectivity with another RAT (NR or E-UTRA); -UE is camping on a cell of E-UTRAN (connected to EPC) with the ability to activate dual connectivity with NR as secondary cell; -UE is in connected mode using NR, E-UTRA (in 5GS) or dual connectivity between E-UTRA and NR. Given the above, SA2 would like to kindly ask for any feedback from GSMA FNW and NGMN on requirements and granularity for Service indicators and/or RAT indicators related to 5G.
GSMA responded in R2-1713952. 6 cases have been identified (see the first picture on top) :
The configurations consist of the following states and are as described in Table 1:
EPS NR NSA (EN-DC) capable UE attached to EPC and currently in IDLE state under or in RRC_connected state connected to E-UTRAN cell not supporting LTE-NR dual connectivity
EPS NR NSA (EN-DC) capable UE attached to EPC and currently in IDLE state under or in RRC_Connected state connected to AND active on LTE for uplink and downlink on only E-UTRAN cell supporting LTE-NR dual connectivity and has not detected NR coverage (i.e. UE is not under NR coverage and/or not configured to make NR measurements)
EPS NR NSA (EN-DC) capable UE attached to EPC and currently in RRC_Connected state connected to E-UTRAN cell (supporting dual connectivity) and active on LTE for uplink and downlink only and has detected NR coverage (i.e. UE is under NR coverage and has been configured to make NR measurements)
EPS NR NSA (EN-DC) capable UE attached to EPC and currently in IDLE state under E-UTRAN cell supporting LTE-NR dual connectivity and has detected NR coverage (i.e. UE is under NR coverage and has been configured to make NR measurements)
EPS NR NSA (EN-DC) capable UE attached to EPC and currently in RRC_Connected state connected to E-UTRAN cell (supporting dual connectivity) and active on LTE and NR for uplink and/or downlink
5GS capable UE attached to 5GC and currently in IDLE state under or in RRC_Connected state connected to NG-RAN (eLTE (option 5 or 7) or NR (option 2 or 4) cell)
As there is no consensus on a single preferred configuration, it is desirable to make the display of 5G status icon in the UE configurable such that the display of 5G status icon can be made depending on operator preference.
This proposal by GSMA was noted by 3GPP in R2-1803949.
RAN WG2 would like to inform GSMA and SA2 that, according to GSMA and SA2 recommendations (LSs R2-1713952 and S2-175270, respectively), RAN WG2 introduced 1 bit indication per PLMN called “upperLayerIndication” within LTE SIB 2. This bit enables the realization of the configurations based on UE states as per recommendation from GSMA (e.g. RRC_IDLE UE as for State 2 in LS R2-1713952 from GSMA)”. For idle mode UEs this is the only mechanism agreed. Actions: RAN WG2 would like to ask GSMA and SA2 to take the information above into account.
Hopefully there will be less confusion when 5G is rolled out about the status icons. In the meantime we might see some more 4.5G icon innovations.
Prof. Andy Sutton delivered his annual IET talk last month which was held the 6th Annual 5G conference. You can watch the videos for that event here (not all have been uploaded at the time of writing this post). His talks have always been very popular on this blog with the last year talk being 2nd most popular while the one in 2017 was the most popular one. Thanks also to IET for hosting this annual event and IET Tv for making this videos available for free.
The slides and video is embedded below but for new starters, before jumping to this, you may want to check out about 5G Network Architecture options in our tutorial here.
A nice video by Peter Clarke on 5G NR throughput calculation for FDD. Right now it's only in the video form but will hopefully be available as a tool on his excellent website here. A tool for 4G throughput calculation is available here.
IET recently held the 6th Annual 5G conference bringing together key players in the 5G world. You can watch the videos for that event here (not all have been uploaded at the time of writing this post).
We reached out to Dr. Yue Wang to share her presentation with us and she has kindly done so. The presentation and video are embedded below.
IPR, Licensing and royalties are always an interesting topic. In the end they decide what price a device would be sold at. If I put it simply, the cost of device = cost of manufacturing + marketing + sales and distribution + support and insurance + profit + IPR. The licensing cost is often added in the end as it could be applicable on the selling price of the device.
Ericsson willing to halve its royalty rate for 5G smartphones to $2.50 per device from $5 to accommodate needs of markets such as India, Nokia likely to charge $3.50 royalty per 5G handset, while Qualcomm will charge up to $16.25 in royalties. #IPR#Patenthttps://t.co/cgZQbiwFft
The above tweet is interesting as it lists out the IPR costs by major patent holders. I wrote a post earlier detailing the 5G patent holders here. Since then this have moved on significantly. In addition to the royalty charged by the 5G patent holders (it also includes legacy technologies like 2G, 3G, 4G &Wi-Fi), there are patents for messaging, Codecs (seperate for audio / video), etc. To be fair it's a complex process. This is why I sometimes get shocked when I see 4G smartphones selling for £20 ($25).
Coming back to the conference, all the presentations are available on ITU page here.
Sylvia Lu, who wears many different hats including one for CW, UK5G and uBlox and a friend of 3G4G blog was one of the speakers at this conference. Here is a tweet on what she had to say about this event:
The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance has jointly organised and executed a successful conference on Licensing Practices in 5G Industry Segments with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), bringing various experts from around the world together to discuss licensing practices and challenges of 5G. The conference featured moderators and speakers from some of the biggest names in telecoms, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Ericsson, Nokia and Microsoft. Also in attendance were key stakeholders of vertical industries, including Audi, Bosch, Panasonic and u-Blox, and patent pool administrators, namely Avanci, MPEG-LA, Sisvel and Via Licensing, who co-sponsored the event, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the Japanese and the European Patent Offices, and the European Commission. Focusing on the development of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), the conference facilitated sharing and discussing of present-day licensing practices and related issues across different industry segments. A host of insightful sessions took place igniting an inclusive exchange on:
Patent licensing practices with interactive discussions that focused on issues stakeholders need to be aware of.
Sharing licensors’, licensees’ and pool administrators’ requirements on patent pools/platforms.
Identifying proposed practices and conducts for licensors and licensees.
Listing requirements for increasing transparency and assessing essentiality of Standard Essential Patents declared to Standards Developing Organisations.
“It’s great to notice that our joint ITU-NGMN conference has been such a success,” said Dr. Peter Meissner, CEO of NGMN. “Obviously, the 5G Eco-System is different. New use cases beyond mobile broadband - like massive IoT as well as highly demanding requirements from vertical industries on low latency, ultra-high reliability and security - are causing substantial network transformations. All these challenges have implications on the intellectual property of mobile network operators and across the different industry segments. Conferences like this are key in identifying IPR issues and exploring solutions for the enlarged eco-system.”
If you have any insights on this topic, or just any comment in general, feel free to add them as comments below.
We looked at slicing not long back in this post here, shared by ITU, from Huawei. The other day I read a discussion on how do you define slicing. Here is my definition:
Network slicing allows sharing of the physical network infrastructure resources into independent virtual networks thereby giving an illusion of multiple logically seperate end-to-end networks, each bound by their own SLAs, service quality and peformance guarantees to meet the desired set of requirements. While it is being officially defined for 5G, there is no reason that a proprietary implementation for earlier generations (2G, 3G or 4G) or Wi-Fi cannot be created.
The picture above from a China Mobile presentation, explain the slice creation process nicely:
Industry customers order network slices from operators and provide the network requirements, including network slice type, capacity, performance, and related coverage. Operators generate network slices according to their needs. Provide the network service requirement as General Service Template (GST).
Transfer GST to NST (Network Slice Template)
Trigger Network Instantiation Process
Allocate the necessary resources and create the slice.
Expose slice management information. Industry customers obtain management information of ordered slices through open interfaces (such as number of access users, etc.).
For each specific requirement, a slicing template is generated that is translated to an actual slice. Let's look at some examples:
Let's take an example of Power Grid. The picture below shows the scenario, requirement and the network slicing template.
As can be seen, the RAN requirement is timing and low latency while the QoS requirement in the core would be 5 ms latency with guaranteed 2 Mbps throughout. There are other requirements as well. The main transport requirement would be hard isolation.
The Network requirement for AR Gaming is high reliability, low latency and high density of devices. This translates to main RAN requirement of low jitter and latency; Transport requirement of Isolation between TICs (telecom integrated cloud) and finally Core QoS requirement of 80 ms latency and 2 Mbps guaranteed bit rate.
5G has dominated the 3G4G blog for last few years. Top 10 posts for 2018 featured 6 posts on 5G while top 10 posts for 2017 featured 7. In makes sense to start 2019 posting with a 5G post.
A special 25th Anniversary edition of NTT Docomo Technical Journal features some nice short articles on 5G covering RAN, Core, Devices & Use cases. Here is some more details for anyone interested.
Radio Access Network in 5G Era introduces NTT Docomo's view of world regarding 5G, scenarios for the deployment of 5G and also prospects for further development of 5G in the future. The article looks at the main features in 5G RAN that will enable eMBB (Massive MIMO), URLLC (short TTI) and mMTC (eDRX).
Core network for Social Infrastructure in 5G Era describes the principal 5G technologies required in the core network to realise new services and applications that will work through collaboration between various industries and businesses. It also introduces initiatives for more advanced operations, required for efficient operation of this increasingly complex network.
This article also goes in detail of the Services Based Architecture (SBA). In case you were wondering what UL CL and SSC above stands for; UpLink CLassifiers (UL CL) is a technology that identifies packets sent by a terminal to a specific IP address and routes them differently (Local Breakout) as can be seen above. It is generally to be used to connect to a MEC server. Session and Service Continuity (SSC) is used to decide if the IP address would be retained when the UE moves to a new area from the old one.
Evolution of devices for the 5G Era discusses prospects for the high-speed, high-capacity, low-latency, and many-terminal connectivity features introduced with 5G, as well as advances in the network expected in the future, technologies that will be required for various types of terminal devices and the services, and a vision for devices in 2020 and thereafter.
According to the article, the medium term strategy of R&D division of NTT Docomo has three main themes: 5G, AI and Devices. In simple terms, devices will collect a lot of data which will become big data, 5G will be used to transport this data and the AI will process all the collected Big Data.
NTT Docomo has also redefined the devices as connecting through various technologies including cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth & Fixed communications.
In addition there are other articles too, but in this post I have focused on 5G only.
Nice article in 25th Anniversary special NTT Docomo technical journal - "History of Mobile Communications with a Look Back at NTT DOCOMO R&D and Outlook for the Future" - https://t.co/DolDIm15jL featuring @seizo_onoepic.twitter.com/QVlpPXvFQS
There were so many other posts that were close to the 10th most popular post. It's always a challenge on which of them make it and which don't. Thanks to everyone for supporting the blog and allowing me to share presentations, slides, videos, etc.
Here is a video we did a few weeks back to clear the misconceptions about 5G. The list above summarizes the topics covered.
The video is nearly 29 minutes long. If you prefer a shorter version or are bored of hearing me 😜 then a summary version (just over 3 minutes) is in 3G4G tweet below.
3GPP held a workshop on 5G NR submission towards IMT-2020 last week. You can access all the agenda, documents, etc. on the 3GPP website here. You can also get a combined version of all presentations from the 3G4G website here. I also wrote a slightly detailed article on this workshop on 3G4G website here.
The following is nice overview of the 5G Radio Interface protocol as defined by 3GPP in NR Rel.15 by Sudeep Palat, Intel. The document was submitted to the 3GPP workshop on ITU submission in Brussels on Oct 24, 2018.
The presentation discusses NR radio interface architecture and protocols for control and user plane; covering RRC, SDAP, PDCP, RLC and MAC, focussing on differences and performance benefits compared to LTE. RRC states and state transitions with reduced transition delays are also discussed.
3GPP held a workshop on 5G NR submission towards IMT-2020 last week. You can access all the agenda, documents, etc. on the 3GPP website here. You can also get a combined version of all presentations from the 3G4G website here. I also wrote a slightly detailed article on this workshop on 3G4G website here.
One of the presentations on 'Physical layer structure, numerology and frame structure, NR spectrum utilization mechanism 3GPP 5G NR submission towards IMT-2020' by Havish Koorapaty, Ericsson is a good introductory material on 5G New Radio (NR) Physical Layer. It is embedded below (thanks to Eiko Seidel for sharing) and the PDF can be downloaded from slideshare or 3G4G website here.
This updated presentation/video looks at 5G Network Architecture options that have been proposed by 3GPP for deployment of 5G. It covers the Standalone (SA) and Non-Standalone (NSA) architecture. In the NSA architecture, EN-DC (E-UTRA-NR Dual Connectivity), NGEN-DC (NG-RAN E-UTRA-NR Dual Connectivity) and NE-DC (NR-E-UTRA Dual Connectivity) has been looked at. Finally, migration strategies proposed by vendors and operators (MNOs / SPs) have been discussed.
Nokia has also released a whitepaper on this topic that I only became aware of after my slides / video were done. More details in the tweet below.
I recently heard Iris Barcia, COO of Keima speak after nearly 6 years at Cambridge Wireless CWTEC 2018. The last time I heard her, it was part of CW Small Cells SIG, where I used to be a SIG (special interest group) champion. Over the last 6 years, the network planning needs have changed from planning for coverage to planning for capacity from the beginning. This particular point started a little debate that I will cover in another post, but you can sneak a peek here 😉.
Embedded below is the video and presentation. The slides can be downloaded from SlideShare.
I was part of Cambridge Wireless CWTEC 2018 organising committee where our event 'The inevitable automation of Next Generation Networks' covered variety of topics with AI, 5G, devices, network planning, etc. The presentations are available freely for a limited period here.
End-to-end #AI in telecoms will involve a mix of capabilities on devices, local RAN, core & NFV - @Samsung at #CWTEC
This presentation also brought out some interesting thoughts and discussions:
While the device-level AI and network-level AI would generally work cooperatively, there is a risk that some vendor may play the system to make their devices perform better than the competitors. Something similar to the signaling storm generated by SCRI (see here).
If the device-level and network-level AI works constructively, an operator may be able to claim that their network can provide a better battery life for a device. For example iPhone XYZ has 25% better battery life on our network rather than competitors network.
If the device-level and network-level AI works destructively for any reason then the network can become unstable and the other users may experience issues.
I guess all these enhancements will start slowly and there will be lots of learning in the first few years before we have a stable, mutually beneficial solution.
