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5G will consist of LTE evolution together with a new radio-access technology, which
we call NX in the following. LTE evolution will focus on backwards-compatible
enhancements in existing spectrum up to ~6 GHz, while NX will focus on new
spectrum, i.e. spectrum where LTE is not deployed. Although large amounts of
contiguous spectrum are less cumbersome to find at higher frequencies, lower
frequencies are important for wide-area coverage and the first NX deployments may
very well target moderately high frequencies. NX will therefore be able to operate
from below 1 GHz up to close to 100 GHz.
LTE evolution
Lets start by taking a closer look at the LTE evolution in release 14. The evolution
should have high ambition levels, striving to meet the 5G requirements. Some of the
main technology areas we see for the LTE evolution include:
Latency reduction. Not only is reduced latency important for an improved end-
user experience and to fully exploit the high data rates provided by LTE, it can
also provide better support for new use cases, for example critical machine-
type communication. As a follow-up to the ongoing release 13 study, instant
uplink access where uplink transmissions can take place without a prior
request-grant phase and a shorter transmission-time interval, 0.5 ms or
less, are likely to be part of release 14 work.
New use cases will be addressed by LTE, for example in the area of
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including vehicular-to-vehicular and
vehicular-to-infrastructure communication. Traffic safety and transportation
efficiency can be greatly improved by enabling information exchange between
vehicles as well as between vehicles and the infrastructure. Compared to
alternative solutions, the existing widespread deployment of LTE is a great
advantage. The usage of mainstream LTE technology also makes it possible
to include a wide range of road users, e.g. pedestrians and bicyclist, in an
overall traffic safety work. The existing device-to-device framework can serve
as a basis for the work on vehicular-to-vehicular communication.
The possibility to address higher frequency bands is one characteristic of NX. Due to
the properties at high frequencies, coverage is more local. high frequency bands
are therefore primarily used to boost capacity and data rates in specific areas, while
wide-area coverage is provided by lower, current frequency bands. This calls for a
tight interworking between high and low frequencies. Hence, with LTE already being
deployed in lower frequency bands, tight interworking between LTE and NX will play
an important role. Such interworking is much tighter than traditional handover and
may build on frameworks similar to carrier aggregation or dual connectivity in LTE.
The benefits of tight interworking can be seen already at moderately high
frequencies, around 4 GHz and higher, so it is not a feature for the very high
frequencies only.
Another key aspect of NX is the ultra-lean design. In short, always on signals should
be kept to an absolute minimum. This reduces energy consumption and
unnecessary interference, and provides a good foundation for forward compatibility
when NX is further evolved in the future. One example is cell-specific reference
signals, which in LTE are constantly broadcasted in a cell and this is something that
should be avoided in the NX design. System control plane is a novel framework
where only the minimum amount of system information necessary to access the
network is broadcasted, possible only by some of the network nodes, and the rest of
the information is provided on demand. This is a good step towards the goal of an
ultra-lean design.
Since 5G to a large extent is about addressing a wide range of use cases beyond
mobile broadband, NX will of course also include components addressing for
example massive and critical machine-type communication.
Stefan Parkvall
Principal Researcher, Ericsson Research
More reading
These previously published items provide additional reading about some of the
above topics:
Licensed Assisted Access: Operation Principles
Licensed Assisted Access: Practical Coexistence Solutions
Tech Talk video: On the road to smarter and safer transport systems
Device to Device communication
Massive beamforming in 5G radio access
High network energy performance with 5G
Ericsson White Paper: 5G radio access technology and capabilities
Ericsson news center: Ericsson first with key 5G advances