Showing posts with label Release 15. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Release 15. Show all posts

Sunday 14 August 2016

3GPP Release-14 & Release-15 update

3GPP is on track for 5G as per a news item on the 3GPP website. In 5G World in London in June, Erik Guttman, 3GPP TSG SA Chairman, and Consultant for Samsung Electronics spoke about progress on Release-14 and Release-15. Here is his presentation.



According to 3GPP:

The latest plenary meeting of the 3GPP Technical Specifications Groups (TSG#72) has agreed on a detailed workplan for Release-15, the first release of 5G specifications.
The plan includes a set of intermediate tasks and check-points (see graphic below) to guide the ongoing studies in the Working Groups. These will get 3GPP in a position to make the next major round of workplan decisions when transitioning from the ongoing studies to the normative phase of the work in December 2016:- the start of SA2 normative work on Next Generation (NexGen) architecture and in March 2017:- the beginning of the RAN Working Group’s specification of the 5G New Radio (NR).
3GPP TSG RAN further agreed that the target NR scope for Release 15 includes support of the following:
  • ■ Standalone and Non-Standalone NR operation (with work for both starting in conjunction and running together)
    • ■ Non-standalone NR in this context implies using LTE as control plane anchor. Standalone NR implies full control plane capability for NR.
    • ■ Some potential architecture configuration options are shown in RP-161266 for information and will be analyzed further during the study
  • ■ Target usecases: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), as well as Low Latency and High Reliability to enable some Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLCC) usecases
  • ■ Frequency ranges below 6GHz and above 6GHz
During the discussion at TSG#72 the importance of forward compatibility - in both radio and protocol design - was stressed, as this will be key for phasing-in the necessary features, enabling all identified usecases, in subsequent releases of the 5G specification.


Telecom TV has posted a video interview with Erik Guttman which is embedded below:



Related posts:



Monday 21 September 2015

Updates from the 3GPP RAN 5G Workshop - Part 1

3GPP held a 5G Workshop in Phoenix last week. 550 delegates and over 70 presentations contributed to the discussion, which covered the full range of requirements that will feed TSG RAN work items for the next five years. I will eventually look at all the presentations and highlight the ones that I find interesting as a part of this blog. Due to the vast number of presentations, I will split them into a few blog posts.

Lets start with the chairman summary. The chair highlighted three high level use cases that 5G needs to address (This has been highlighted in many presentations, see here for example):
  • Enhanced Mobile Broadbandare 
  • Massive Machine Type Communications
  • Ultra-reliable and Low Latency Communications
As can be seen in the picture above, 3GPP is planning to split the 5G work into two phases. Phase 1 (Rel-15) will look at a subset of requirements that are important for the commercial needs of the day. Phase 2 (Rel-16) will look at more features, use cases, detailed requirements, etc.

Here is the chair summary of the workshop:




The presentation (RWS-150002) from Motorola/Lenovo highlighted the need to handle different spectrum. For sub-6GHz, the existing air interface could work with slight modifications. For spectrum between 6GHz and 30GHz, again a similar air interface like 4G may be good enough but for above 30GHz, there is a need for new one die to phase noise.

The presentation by CATT or China Academy of Telecommunication Technology (RWS-150003) is quite interesting and is embedded below. They also propose Pattern Division Multiple Access (PDMA).




Orange (RWS-150004) has definitely put a thought into what good 5G would be. Their presentation is embedded below too:




The presentation from Huawei (RWS-150006) introduced the concept of Unified Air Interface, UAI.



They presentation also explains the concept of Adaptive Frame structures and RAN slicing very well. For those who may be wondering, uMTC stands for ultra-reliable MTC and mMTC stands for massive MTC. RAN slicing enables the RAN to be partitioned such that a certain amount of carriers are always dedicated to a certain services independently of other services. This ensures that the service in the slice is always served reliably.

The final presentation is the vision and priorities by 5GPPP as follows:



Sunday 19 April 2015

3GPP Release-13 work started in earnest


The 3GPP news from some months back listed the main RAN features that have been approved for Release-13 and the work has already started on them. The following are the main features (links contain .zip files):

  • LTE in unlicensed spectrum (aka Licensed-Assisted Access) - RP-150055
  • Carrier Aggregation enhancements - RP-142286
  • LTE enhancements for Machine-Type Communications (MTC) - RP-141865
  • Enhancements for D2D - RP-142311
  • Study Item Elevation Beamforming / Full-Dimension MIMO - RP-141831
  • Study Item Enhanced multi-user transmission techniques - RP-142315
  • Study Item Indoor positioning - RP-141102
  • Study Item Single-cell Point-to-Multipoint (SC-PTM) - RP-142205


Another 3GPP presentation from late last year showed the system features that were being planned for Rel-13 as shown above.

I have also posted a few items earlier relating to Release13, as follows:


Ericsson has this week published a whitepaper on release 13, with a vision for 'Networked Society':
The vision of the Networked Society, where everything that benefits from being connected will be connected, places new requirements on connectivity. LTE is a key component in meeting these demands, and LTE release 13 is the next step in the LTE evolution.
Their whitepaper embedded below:



It should be pointed out that 5G work does not start until Release-15 as can be seen from my tweet

xoxoxo Added Later (26/04/2015) xoxoxo
I came across this presentation from Keysight (Agilent) where Moray Rumney has provided information in much more detail.