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Release 14 will mark the start of 5G work in 3GPP.

In addition to the continued LTE


evolution, a new radio access technology will be standardized, and these two
technologies together will form 5G radio access. In this blog post, I will shed some
light on a number of the key areas low latency communication, spectrum flexibility,
machine type communication, multi-antenna and multi-site transmission techniques,
and ultra-lean design and how they can be part of the upcoming 5G work in 3GPP.

3GPP, the standardization organization behind LTE, is currently working on LTE


release 13, which I have described in an earlier blog post as well as in a Tech Talk
video. Work on release 14, with strong emphasis on 5G, is scheduled to start early
2016 and discussions about its content are starting now.

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.

Unlicensed spectrum has received a lot of attention in release 13 and will


continue to be in focus also in the coming releases. Currently, the carrier-
aggregation framework is used to aggregate licensed and unlicensed
spectrum and forms the basis for downlink-focused license-assisted access in
release 13. In practice, carrier aggregation implies that the same node is
handling licensed as well as unlicensed spectrum. A natural enhancement is
to extend license-assisted access to build upon the dual-connectivity
framework. This will provide additional deployment flexibility as physically
separate nodes can handle the two spectrum types. Full support for uplink
transmissions in unlicensed spectrum is also a natural part of release 14.

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.

Massive machine-type communication (MTC) is a vital part of the overall


vision of a networked society. LTE has already been enhanced in previous
releases and is well positioned to combine low device cost with long battery
lifetime two of the main requirements for massive machine-type
communication. Release 14 will further improve the MTC capacity as well as
look into new features for MTC devices such as MBMS support for delivering
software upgrades and device-to-device relaying for coverage extension.

Massive MIMO, or full-dimension MIMO as it is called in 3GPP, is about using


a large number of antenna elements, e.g. for two-dimensional beamforming
and/or multi-user MIMO. The focus of release 14 will be to extend the current
massive MIMO framework to an even larger number of antennas (more than
16) and to secure the development of requirements and test methodologies to
facilitate real-life deployment of these technologies.

NX new radio access technology


Although the LTE evolution will be capable of addressing many of the 5G
requirements, there is a need for an additional radio-access technology. NX will go
beyond the LTE evolution and not take backwards compatibility into account. Some
of the driving forces behind NX are even higher performance, extreme use case
requirements, and the need to exploit spectrum not addressed by LTE evolution.
A selection of NX technology components are illustrated below.

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.

Multi-antenna techniques such as beamforming and massive MIMO, and multi-site


connectivity will play important roles in NX. At higher frequencies, beamforming is a
necessity to handle the challenging link budget. The ongoing trend of integrating RF
components closer to the antenna elements contributes to make advanced multi-
antenna techniques a reality. Multi-site connectivity, where the terminal is
simultaneously connected to multiple sites, is very useful to guarantee delivery of
data packets within a tight latency budget. This is important in some critical machine-
type communication applications, for example remote control of machinery. It can
also be used for distributed MIMO to provide higher data rates.

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.

Some of these technology components have already been demonstrated in our 5G


testbed, shown to a larger audience at Mobile World Congress this year. The testbed
has been used to demonstrate multi-Gbps data rates with beamforming and OFDM
modulation at 15 GHz carrier frequency. We also use the testbed to try different
advanced antenna setups and to evaluate coverage indoors as well as outdoors.

Designing a new radio-access technology such as NX is a major task. The work on


NX will therefore span multiple releases in 3GPP. Channel modelling work is
expected to start already towards the end of this year, followed by a study phase in
release 14. Actual specification work is expected in release 15, resulting in a first
version of NX specifications in the latter half of 2018 to facilitate initial commercial
deployment in 2020. This set of specifications will fulfill a subset of the 5G
requirements. Complete fulfillment of all 5G requirements is targeted in release 16 by
the end of 2019. This is also the release that will be provided to ITU.
I hope I have given some insight into the upcoming work on 5G, including LTE
evolution and NX. LTE evolution and NX are both very important tools for realizing
the continued development of the networked society. We certainly have some very
interesting years ahead of us!

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

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