March 2016 FierceWireless The 5G Vision: Preparing for the

The 5G Vision: Preparing for the Next Stage in Wireless Networks

FierceWirelessAn eBook from the editors ofMarch 2016

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2 Introduction

5 Spectrum strategies for 5G: A Study in Tradeoffs

10 Sponsored Content: Yes It’s Coming: The Promise of 5G

11 2020 Watch: The 5G Standards Process Gets Underway

15 Sponsored Content: A Tale of Evolution and Revolution for Operators

16 5G Use Cases That Will Change the Future

20 How the Internet of Things Will Be Built into 5GThank you to our sponsors:

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Operators and Vendors Rush Headlong into 5G, but Specifics and Standards Remain Elusive // March 2016

n2 Introduction

n5 Spectrum Strategies for 5G: A Study in Tradeoffs

n10 Sponsored Content: Yes It’s Coming: The Promise of 5G

n11 2020 Watch: The 5G Standards Process Gets Underway

n15 Sponsored Content: A Tale of Evolution and Revolution for Operators

n16 5G Use Cases that Will Change the Future

n20 How the Internet of Things Will Be Built into 5G

FierceWirelessAn eBook from the editors ofshare:

Introduction: Operators and vendors rush headlong into 5G, but specifics and standards remain elusive

By Mike Dano Editor-in-Chief /// FierceWireless

Operators across the world—from the United States to South Korea to Germany—are currently in the midst of testing 5G network technology with the goal of rolling it out commercially as early as next year. And they appear to be largely unconcerned with the fact that the 5G standards-setting process is still in its infancy, and there’s still not much concrete consensus about how 5G will actually work.

In the United States, wireless network operators are moving forward with plans to test 5G this year. Already, Verizon said its initial 5G trials show blazing fast network speeds topping 10 Gbps and the ability to transmit 4K video while moving. The operator, which is conducting its 5G tests with partners Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, Samsung and Qualcomm, also revealed that it is on track to commercially launch 5G as early as 2017.

“5G is no longer a dream of the distant future,” said Roger Gurnani, chief information and technology

architect for Verizon. “We feel a tremendous sense of urgency to push forward on 5G ... to usher in a new generation of innovation.”

Not to be outdone, T-Mobile said recently it will conduct its own 5G network technology field trials in the second half of this year with both Ericsson and its LTE network vendor Nokia. And AT&T said it will collaborate with Ericsson and Intel to test 5G network technology in the operator’s Austin, Texas, network labs starting in the second quarter of this year, and that it plans to conduct outdoor tests and trials of the technology this summer. AT&T said that it expects to conduct field trials of 5G before year-end, with those trials focusing on providing wireless connectivity to fixed locations.

“New experiences like virtual reality, self-driving cars, robotics, smart cities and more are about to test networks like never before,” explained John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer. “5G will help make them a reality.”







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International operators pushing the envelope Overseas operators are engaging in similar efforts. Korean mobile operator KT is aiming to launch a live 5G service for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games being hosted in Pyeongchang—KT has pledged to build a wireless network that can host up to 250,000 devices simultaneously. Further, KT has already demonstrated its planned 5G services in front of the Olympics organizing committee, including virtual reality (VR) fare. The company’s 360-degree VR platform will provide live channels in real-time, allowing home viewers to see the games in from any direction and angle. A Sync View option meanwhile features a split screen view: the view of the athlete, streamed in Ultra HD from a small camera, and another of the regular game broadcast. Holograms of players are also planned, and a facial recognition initiative called 5G Safety will use videos taken by drones and cameras for security purposes.

Meanwhile, SK Telecom in Korea has demonstrated a 5G platform built in collaboration with Nokia and Intel that offers 20 Gbps—which is 200 times faster and with 1,000 times more data capacity than the current 4G LTE network. Speeds like that allow a user to download a two-gigabyte movie in less than one second.

And in Europe, Stockholm-based TeliaSonera and Ericsson said they aim to offer some version of 5G services to TeliaSonera customers in Stockholm and Estonia’s Tallinn as early as 2018. Also in Europe, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are both racing to test 5G systems with various vendors, with the intent to

move the technology forward as quickly as possible.

Network equipment vendors, of course, are wasting no time in selling into this demand. At the recent Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, all of the market’s top gear suppliers offered their own evidence that they’re ready for the industry’s move to a 5G playing field. Specifically, Ericsson used its 5G radio prototypes with MU-MIMO and beam-tracking to deliver more than 25 Gbps throughput in a 5G field trial. And Nokia—fresh from its purchase of Alcatel-Lucent—announced its new AirScale Radio Access base station at the show, which the company described as “5G ready.” (CEO Rajeev Suri clarified that “5G-ready” means the product can be upgraded to whatever the industry’s 5G standard ends up being via software and radio-equipment upgrades.)

Standards work still in its early stages But all of this activity has raised some serious concerns. In its discussion of the top themes at the recent MWC show, research firm CCS Insight said that “5G technology was a leading theme among network operators at this year’s event, but the industry risks becoming embroiled in a race to be the first to launch a 5G network at the expense of establishing a water-tight set of standards for the wider good.”

Others echoed those concerns. “We want to do things in the correct way,” explained Sandro Dionisi, director of global advisory services for Telecom Italia, in comments at MWC. He said that the wireless industry needs a single 5G standard so that operators can leverage each







n2 Introduction








other’s work and be thrifty in their spending on new network technology. Dionisi and others cautioned against broadly deploying 5G ahead of an official set of standards for the technology.

“What is important is that we have one standard at the end of the day,” noted Alain Maloberti, SVP of Orange Lab Networks.

To be clear, groups like the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance and the 5G-PPP are working on exactly that: a series of standards and recommendations for the deployment of 5G, with the goal of creating one standard that operators, vendors and others will be able to leverage. Clearly the ghosts of the GSM-versus-CDMA wars of years’ past continues to weigh heavily on all players in the industry.

But it’s unlikely that the wireless industry will be able to wait for long. Verizon—arguably the world’s leading

carrier when it comes to testing and deploying 5G—is likely doing so in order to stave off rising competition from the likes of T-Mobile and AT&T. Those operators have largely closed the “network gap” in LTE between their networks and Verizon’s network in the United States, which positions 5G as a way for Verizon to separate itself from the competition just as it did with its first-to-market launch of LTE back in 2010.

5G is unmistakably blossoming into the next major battleground for the world’s wireless network operators, equipment vendors and associated providers. Much in the sector remains cloudy, but what is certain is that 5G will drive a growing amount of activity in the space in the coming years.

In this eBook from FierceWireless, we will delve into the challenges and promise offered by 5G and look at what some providers are doing to prepare for this next wireless technology advance. n

Tara Seals contributed to this article.







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Spectrum Strategies for 5G: A Study in TradeoffsBy Tara Seals

Wireless operators are beginning to plan for future buildouts of 5G networks, which will offer 100X increases in capacity, data rates and connections supported, along with a 10X reduction in latency. It will be a mammoth step-change from today’s LTE networks, aimed at supporting ubiquitous video and the Internet of Things (IoT)—and it will require brand-new approaches to spectrum in order to make it work.

As we know, different spectrum bands have different propagation and bandwidth characteristics. Given the range of use cases that are expected for 5G (everything from high-bandwidth mobile video to low-latency, narrowband industrial sensors), operators first and foremost need to look at their operational and business models to ensure their spectrum holdings match their goals.

In general, operators will look to build a balanced spectrum portfolio. “It’s vital that the portfolio

contain low-band spectrum for coverage and building penetration, midrange for capacity, and also reasonable coverage in the sub-2 GHz, above 1 MHz range, which has characteristics suited for suburban deployments,” explained Ken Rehbehn, research analyst with 451 Research. “5G also opens up the possibility for using much greater swathes above the 3 GHz threshold,” some of which will likely be in the millimeter wave band (60-90 GHz).

That said, one size does not fit all, and getting the blend of spectrum “flavors” right has implications for capex for the initial network build, as well as for ongoing operational cost—and tradeoffs have to be made.

Going up-band The issue of spectrum is tightly wedded to the business cases for 5G. For instance, for a carrier that sees new revenue streams in video-heavy, smartphone-based digital services for consumers and businesses, capacity







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will be the driving principle. And in general, the higher the spectrum band, the greater the capacity is.

“As you rise in frequency, you move from a congested area to the equivalent of an open highway through the desert,” Rehbehn explains. “You can build the highway straight, and you can build it wide. In the lower bands, you have to build a small road that winds and twists around legacy stakeholders. It’s the difference between downtown Boston and the Mojave desert.”

That’s why, when it comes to top spectrum strategies for 5G deployments in the near term, many operators will be making a move to higher frequency bands. However, the higher the frequency band, the more difficult it is for radio signals to propagate—so new challenges abound as well.

“At 5 GHz and over, the challenge is to learn to use spectrum with limited range for coverage,” said Monica Paolini, analyst at Senza Fila Consulting. “It can be a useful feature, as it allows them to limit the impact of interference and increases spectrum reuse (dense networks are required), but it also means that they have to plan and deploy networks in a different way.”

In general, more cell sites and more elaborate transmission gear will be required to offset the low ranges in the higher bands, and that has significant operational implications: More sites mean additional monthly lease fees for the right to host the equipment there, not to mention additional overhead in monthly power and backhaul costs. And, an additional challenge is that

some of the new bands may be unlicensed or lightly licensed, so operators will need to address the issue of coexistence, with new technology.

“That said, as society transforms in how we use mobile services, these costs can be offset by opportunities for revenue,” Rehbehn noted. “I also see enormous potential for new entrants and non-traditional wireless lines of business appearing and altering the landscape here. An obvious question is, do cablecos need fixed lines into the home with 5G?”

It’s also a given that in the higher bands, small cells will come into play to help with the propagation issues. “When you move to higher bands—3.5 GHz and above—small cells are the rule and not the exception,” said Paolini. “Macro cells don’t work at high frequency. What this means is that small cells may finally get deployed mostly in these higher bands, and leave macro-only networks in the cellular frequency bands (sub-3 MHz). This makes small cells easier to deploy and avoids the small-macro cell interference. It will also push small cells more to indoor locations, where a short range is more appropriate.”

“5G … opens up the possibility for using much greater swathes above the 3 GHz threshold.”

KEN REHBEHN, PRINCIPAL ANALYST, MOBILE TELECOM CHANNEL, 451 RESEARCH







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As Paolini intimated, a network with smaller, bounded cells that don’t bleed into each other lends itself to spectral efficiency, because it’s possible to reuse frequencies in adjacent cells without the fear of interference. In this way, it’s possible to double or even triple one’s frequency use across cells that are much smaller than what’s seen in the LTE world—sometimes only tens of meters across.

This requires a new architecture and control plane approach, but it also has positive characteristics for the user experience.

“In the high bands, the very notion of the ‘cell,’ that it has a certain radius from the base station, kind of goes away,” said Keith Mallinson, analyst at WiseHarbor Research. “You get to the point where you connect to two or three sites at a same time, and the handoff blurs. This improves performance because end users are getting the signal from two or three sites.”

Millimeter wave Even further up in frequencies, lies the millimeter wave band, which lies between 30 GHz and 300 GHz. It’s likely that this spectrum will be important in 5G deployments, but it carries its own set of challenges: Millimeter waves travel solely by line-of-sight, and are blocked by building walls and attenuated by foliage and rain fade. They also can only be used for terrestrial communications over about a kilometer.

In the millimeter wave band, 5G will be enabled by massive MIMO approaches with beamforming. The

short wavelengths allow modest antenna sizes to have a small beam width, further increasing frequency reuse potential. And the more antennas the transmitter/receiver is equipped with, the more the possible signal paths and the better the performance in terms of data rate and link reliability.

Massive MIMO, as its name suggests, makes use of a very large number of service antennas (e.g., hundreds or thousands) that are operated fully coherently and adaptively. Extra antennas help by focusing the transmission and reception of signal energy into ever-smaller regions of space. This brings huge improvements in throughput and energy efficiency.

The price to pay is increased complexity of the hardware, and the complexity and energy consumption of the signal processing at both ends.

“Building penetration remains an open question, as in, millimeter wave doesn’t typically have even one-wall penetration,” Rehbehn noted. “But when you look at outdoor and transportation use cases, especially for rail lines and for highway use, millimeter wave works quite well.”

Existing LTE spectrum bands – sub 5 GHz With all the discussion of high-frequency bands, it’s easy to forget that existing cellular bands still have an important part to play in 5G.

“High bands are interesting for capacity, but operators







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will need an anchor of a lower band for coverage and for control and signaling channels,” Mallinson said.

He added that lower frequencies are perfect for M2M and IoT applications as well. “There are so many different use cases, and some are narrowband and not so spectrally demanding,” he explained. “Those billions of IoT devices will need very little in the way of bandwidth. But I suspect that a lot of the capabilities will overlap, especially when it comes to supporting highly resilient applications.”

He added, “5G is trying to be all things to all people with one unified network—but there will be slices for certain service profiles, like those that need high availability and low power consumption. So there will always be traffic on lower bands from things like vending machines and remote pipelines.”

Existing bands will also be important considering that 5G likely will have a new air interface and protocol, resulting in a variety of deployment schedules across operators.

“You will need to have a distinct allocation in the low bands for 5G, for the fallback of being able to use the 4G connection if there is no direct 5G protocol availability,” Mallinson explained.

This is especially apropos considering that there will be plenty of architectural overlap from 4G to 5G. “Below 3 GHz, I believe were going to see operators leverage LTE to the max,” said Rehbehn. “LTE has a significant future even within 5G networks. It’ll be a blurry line between LTE and 5G. The 3GPP LTE Advanced releases 13 and 14 anticipate many of the characteristics of 5G, but are very well suited for lower frequency bands.”

Opening up the stores While spectrum strategies are varied when it comes to 5G, there’s a rather large elephant in the room: Much of this spectrum has not yet been released or assigned.

Nations are trying to coordinate on global bands for 5G; the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) WSC process is for now looking at lower bands (below 6GHz) to coordinate national releases of new spectrum. For the higher bands, WSC 2019 will determine how to allocate airwaves above the 6GHz band.

Existing efforts mostly focus on reallocating existing spectrum. The latest swathes of interest tend to be analog broadcast spectrum—which is the 600 MHz band in the US. “Broadcasters need to be displaced, but many terrestrial broadcasting groups are reluctant to give it up,” Mallinson said. “But in Europe you can’t do this on a piecemeal basis because of interference.”

“5G is trying to be all things to all people with one unified network—but there will be slices for certain service profiles, like those that need high availability and low power consumption.”

KEITH MALLINSON, FOUNDER, WISEHARBOR







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The FCC meanwhile in the United States is gearing up for an incentive auction of unused analog TV spectrum, left over from the digital TV transition. The hope is to free up more spectrum for 4G and, eventually, 5G. It will

be a two-sided auction for the spectrum; the government will first offer broadcasters that choose to participate a fair value for their assets, before turning around and selling it to the highest-bidding mobile carriers. n







Sponsored Content

The fifth generation of mobile technology (5G) promises ubiquitous high-speed mobile broadband service and opens the door to a new generation of rich mobile applications. 5G will be instrumental in the adoption of IoT technologies like wearables, smart homes, industry applications, traffic control, and it will accelerate high-speed media delivery. The standards body ITU-R will define the requirements for 5G networks in IMT-2020 for mobile communication beyond 2020.

5G Aspirations 5G seeks to deliver greater throughput, lower latency, higher reliability, increased mobility range, and improved density with integrated security mechanisms.

• Sub-1ms latency air interface

• Down-link speeds greater than 1Gbps

• 10-100x increase in connected devices with higher connection rates and throughput

• 90% reduction in energy use with up to 10 years of battery life for low-power M2M devices

• Higher security requirements due to increase vulnerabilities with the number of connected devices

5G Landscapes 5G Architecture will be heterogeneous with many types of access technologies, multi-layer networks, and will support many types of devices. For operators, 5G networks will scale to deliver various use cases in an agile and cost efficient manner. End users will gain enhanced services delivery in a seamless and consistent manner in areas including transportation, commerce, health care, and safety.

The industry believes that 5G will be built with both current and evolving technologies and include new Radio Access Technologies (RATs) optimized for deployments such as IoT, using millimeter wave (mmWave) and LTE-Advanced for true mobile broadband access.

On the network side, network slicing will be an important mechanism to handle the diverse applications requirements and user groups. Slicing will be a way to provide isolated sub-networks, with each optimized for specific use case traffic characteristics.

Exponential growth in the number of connected devices and the associated increase in data usage will alter the network traffic characteristics. This presents an enormous challenge for mobile operators, as they will need to build solutions

that can scale to support both a high concurrent connection and an increased connection rate. Additionally, operators will need to support end-to-end security for user data and install mechanisms for defending the network infrastructure from nefarious actors. Future 5G networks will need to provide network enforced security policies including authentication, key management, and data security services.

Efforts in 4G with NFV/SDN are paving the way for 5G. A comprehensive interoperable NFV/SDN ecosystem with programmable open APIs and advanced orchestration capabilities enable service providers to scale their networks with more flexible and agile architectures. This in turn allows for rapid services delivery at lower cost.

To lead the evolution to 5G, top 20 mobile operators have formed the Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) Alliance. Their goal is to establish open standards for 5G networks. Vendors and operators should work with ITU and NGMN Alliance to define requirements. Additionally, the industry should continue to focus on multi-carrier LTE-A and NFV/SDN to ensure high-performance, high scale network, and a security infrastructure capable of protecting the networks, services, and end devices that are part of the 5G ecosystem. n

Yes It’s Coming: The Promise of 5G By Patricia Du, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, F5 Networks


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2020 Watch: The 5G Standards Process Gets Underway By Tara Seals

The next generation of mobile networks, known as 5G, is slowly making its way from lab to field as major carriers and infrastructure vendors continue to work on its development. Promising to deliver 10 to 100 times faster throughput than 4G networks, with greater spectral efficiency and a converged, cloud-enabled architecture, 5G is a competitive necessity driven by demand for better video experiences, more bandwidth in general and the developing tsunami of the IoT.

While some early commercial work is starting to develop, many different groups are involved in the development of 5G standards—from ATIS to 3GPP to the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance and more, all interested in framing real-world scenarios and commercial technology plans for what is still a loosely defined concept of the “next-generation network.”

Breaking down 5G Technical standards for 5G began to coalesce in 2015, with an eye to making 5G-based services commercially available by the end of this decade. But actual architecture design and definition remain somewhat nebulous as global standards bodies work to hammer out a universal approach. It should be noted that 5G is not a monolithic entity but, in practice, an umbrella term that is being applied to a range of technology developments.

For now, the NGMN Alliance defines the following requirements for 5G networks:

• Data rates of several tens of megabits per second should be supported for tens of thousands of users

• 1 Gbps to be offered simultaneously to many workers on the same office floor







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• Several hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections to be supported for massive sensor deployments—a 100X increase in the number of devices connected

• Capacity should increase by a factor of 100X over today’s networks

• Spectral efficiency should be significantly enhanced compared to 4G

• Coverage should be improved

• Signaling efficiency should be enhanced

• Latency should be reduced significantly compared to LTE, by a factor of 5X to 10X

• Network density should increase by a factor of 10X

Despite the vague guidelines, standards for 5G are expected to start to become reality in the 2018 timeframe, with commercial deployments beginning in 2020 and beyond.

According to the 3GPP timeline, which 5G Americas, ATIS, NGMN Alliance and most other industry groups adhere to, the first phase of the standards process should be completed in the second half of 2018 with a second phase following by December of 2019, just in time for the global ITU evaluation process known as IMT-2020.

Defining operator requirements As a first step in what promises to be a long, complex process, early work now is being done to fast-track







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detailed 5G specifications by defining the industry requirements and operator business imperatives that will direct 5G’s eventual technical capabilities and provide the basis for subsequent 5G standardization.

“In general, there are three general 5G families of use cases,” explained Chris Pearson, president at 5G Americas. “There’s an enhanced mobile broadband requirement for delivering faster speeds; a massive Internet of Things (IoT) play, where the network has to be designed to deal with billions and billions of connections and have the flexibility to handle different types of connections; and then there’s the low-latency machine-to-machine (M2M) and critical communications piece.”

The trick is that the unified 5G network must be flexible enough to accommodate all of the scenarios. But, these requirements do not fall in to a single technology silo or market, and work in diverse groups is needed to address them.

For instance ATIS, which represents the particular priorities of the North American operators, users and vendors, is examining how 5G can enable operators to measure and enhance the overall quality of experience perceived by end users. And, it’s clear that the challenges of video, virtual reality, the Internet of Things (IoT) and low-latency interaction will drive new approaches to content distribution and delivery in the United States in particular.

“Part of what we are seeing now is the process of different communities defining their requirements to feed in to the technical work,” said Jim McEachern and Iain Sharp, senior technology consultants at ATIS. “These requirements will give the direction to 5G standards that encompasses the particular needs of the North American region and takes advantage of the regions’ technical prowess and orientation toward innovative services and service delivery.”

Making 5G more concrete Armed with a general idea of future operator requirements, there are some areas where technical work is expected to begin first—including figuring out how to extend LTE for 5G use.

For the currently available spectrum bands, LTE is very close to reaching the technologically possible efficiency limits. Hence, it is expected that LTE will remain as the baseline technology for wide area broadband coverage in the 5G era.

Thus, 3GPP said that it expects to continue working on enhancing LTE not only from the radio perspective,

“Undoubtedly, a major component of 5G will be at least one new cellular radio access technology (RAT) introducing radio interface technology that can be adapted to both massive mobile broadband and massive IoT—two quite different sets of requirements,”

JIM MCEACHERN & IAIN SHARP, SENIOR TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANTS, ATIS







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but also from service delivery perspective (e.g. making it more suitable for M2M). Consequently, interworking with LTE will remain a critical factor in standards development going forward.

On the radio access side, a new and more agile multi-use technology will be required.

“Undoubtedly, a major component of 5G will be at least one new cellular radio access technology (RAT) introducing radio interface technology that can be adapted to both massive mobile broadband and massive IoT—two quite different sets of requirements,” said McEachern and Sharp. As such, “The new 5G radio will also bring very high-frequency (above 5 GHz) radio in to cellular service for the first time.”

The development and deployment of a new RAT is a massive investment by the communications industry which requires global economies of scale if it is to be effective, so the requirements of many communities of interest need to be incorporated in to the design. As 5G RAT development moves from defining requirements to addressing more of the technical details, it’s expected that the 3GPP will take a leading role to develop a RAT that includes global requirements and provides a strong evolution story for LTE-based operators.

Beyond the work on the RAT there are a range of activities under the term “5G” that will be necessary to address network evolution across the full technology stack, beyond the radio access link.

“The classic cellular core network must become more flexible and adaptable to address many different types of users and different access technologies,” McEachern and Sharp noted. It’s likely that much of today’s work on network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) will be crucial in developing 5G architectures.

“Separation of user plane and control plane have long since been a key design element of mobile networks, making most of the mobile network architecture an ideal candidate for virtualized deployments,” the 3GPP 5G roadmap noted. “Industry activities and inception of specialized industry interest groups (e.g. ETSI NFV) all point towards the feasibility of this approach.”

3GPP standards work on virtualization is about to be started, in Release 12. Initial focus will be turned towards O&M aspects, while work on core network and radio architecture is expected to follow later.

It is clear that some regions are aiming to have at least the first version of a 5G RAT standard available by 2018, according to McEachern and Sharp. The emerging industry consensus suggests standards for a 5G-optimized mobile core will be available around 2020. The broader evolution of standards under the 5G umbrella will occur on a longer timetable around the agreed-upon timeline of 2020 for commercial, standardized 5G deployment, and will ultimately not be tied to a single standard or release. n







Sponsored Content

Wireless operators are planning for 5G, and there’s lots of discussion about spectrum – What is available and what is coming? Focus areas for 5G converged over the past year or so, and represent a wide range of performance parameters – enhanced mobile broadband, Internet of Things (IoT), ultra-reliable communications and very low latency. These map to a huge variety of services, some well known like HD video and M2M communications, but many others that have yet to be imagined. The diversity of services will drive spectrum demands across a wide range of frequencies.

IoT, which demands long range and low power, would benefit from lower frequency bands which offer more favorable propagation characteristics. Enhanced mobile broadband and low latency communications will require larger chunks of spectrum only available at higher frequencies. So what does that mean for operators and their approach to spectrum bands for 5G? It’s a tale of two spectrums: below 6 GHz and above 6 GHz.

Let’s start with sub 6 GHz – the tale of evolution. The lower bands are great for legacy and IoT services. The lower the frequency, the farther the signal travels, and the more easily it goes through walls and buildings. This is essential to the deployment of billions of connected devices. With regard to operator deployment, the sub 6 GHz bands can be seen as a natural progression: cell sites and antenna technologies will not be that much different, and radio equipment will need to be upgraded with the new waveforms. That’s similar to the rollout of 3G and 4G, and with marketing being what it is, we will likely see operators advertise that they’ve deployed 5G systems in the near future… even if only an incremental change over the previous generation. In terms of spectrum, it’s just half the story.

The second part – and frankly, the more challenging part – is in the tale of revolution: spectrum above 6 GHz. To achieve the significantly increased data rates of 5G, much higher bandwidths are needed, and the only place

left to look is much higher carrier frequencies, the millimeter wave (mmW) bands. The ITU weighed in with WRC-15 directing the industry to study frequencies from 24 to 86 GHz1, and in the US the FCC is actively soliciting industry feedback with a goal of accelerating regulations2. Time will tell which bands will be selected; which will be used for access links, backhaul links or both; and whether the bands will be licensed, unlicensed, or shared. However, use of mmW bands and the related need to accelerate small cell deployment and architect systems with seamless mobility among all varieties of wireless access is a necessary leap forward to deliver 5G services. This migration can be costly, and a challenge for the engineering community is to provide cost-effective technology to enable profitable businesses. However, when the time comes, it will be demanded of legacy operators to deploy these systems to meet the services and expectations of 5G. And, if they don’t do it… someone else will. n

Spectrum: A tale of evolution and revolution for operators By Dr. Robert DiFazio

1http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/wrc/2015/2https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-announces-agenda-spectrum-frontiers-workshop-and-tech-demo


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5G Use Cases that Will Change the FutureBy Jason Bovberg

Now that the industry is busy establishing a 5G standard and talking about capabilities and networks speeds, it’s time to talk about what exactly will 5G networks allow us to do that we can’t do today. From enabling driverless cars to connected cities, 5G’s massive bandwidth capacity and virtual zero latency are poised to empower a whole new level of communications for the future.

According to Peter Jarich, vice president for consumer and infrastructure services at Current Analysis, the real-world applications that 5G will enable are fairly well understood. “There’s no shortage of discussion about the Internet of Things (IoT), mission-critical use cases, machinery use cases, connected cars, and public safety,” he says. On the high end, that discussion is about emergent communications, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). “The idea of scaling from very low bandwidth to very high bandwidth, from low-bandwidth IoT to very high-bandwidth AR/VR, the idea of low latency where you need it in terms of mission-

critical communication to much less latency-sensitive communications like industrial IoT, pinging devices—I think those use cases have all been called out.”

The interesting part of the conversation, Jarich says, is thinking about what the future holds. “What are the specific IoT applications that 5G will enable? What are the specific AR/VR applications? When you get a feel for some of those, you’ll start seeing a lot of great capabilities coming out of the woodwork. That’s when we’ll start looking at 5G not just as a technology, but as a platform.”

And to get an idea of 5G’s possibilities, perhaps we need look no further than 4G.

5G in 4G According to Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, director, wireless operator strategies at Strategy Analytics, 5G services will start arriving on 4G LTE before 5G RF is even available. “There will be a plethora of specific use







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n11 C2020 Watch: The 5G Standards Process Gets Underway




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cases and pre-5G services before 5G reaches widespread commercial deployment,” she says. For this reason, the capabilities of 5G will become clear before its actual arrival.

Grimaldo also sees SDN/NFV deployment as essential to enabling 5G to cost-effectively and quickly enable new services to foster innovation, partnerships, and multiple business models. “5G will create a better network and ecosystem for new and evolved services as wireless connectivity becomes even more integrated into our lives, work, and things, yet we will also see a good number of use cases enabled on the road to 5G with advancements in 4G LTE.”

Sue Rudd, director, service provider analysis, Strategy Analytics, agrees. “Services that are defined as 5G services are coming on 4G networks long before 5G Ultra-Broadband is deployed. Many 5G services will happen in 2016-2019 without any new Ultra-Broadband radio access.”

Rudd adds, “5G has been a catalyst for the design of Network Slices that define End to End (E2E) classes of service. Even before 5G radio bandwidth arrives, SDN will allow operators to provision Network Slices on pre-5G networks and to dynamically request diverse classes of service, whether low-bandwidth IoT sensors, low-latency multi-party gaming, or real-time control of driverless cars—all running over a common transport infrastructure. As 5G delivers superfast RF access, the high-end services will increase performance with minimal network disruption.”

From AR to autonomous vehicles Guang Yang, senior analyst, wireless networks & platforms for Strategy Analytics, sees three use-case categories for 5G: enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), massive M2M connectivity (mMTC), and ultra-reliable/low latency M2M (uMTC). “For eMBB, current 4G/4.5G indeed can meet most of demands. Perhaps only in the case of ultra-high traffic density or new applications with ultra-high bandwidth demand—such as VR/AR—will 5G could show its unique value.”

AR—augmenting reality with additional information—will be most important in industrial use cases, where there is a need to layer information on top of existing real-world scenarios. “The classic movie example is the soldier of the future, viewing the environment, and on top of everything are layers of technical information about the situation, such as how many people are in a building,” says Jarich. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other examples—for example, a machine that teaches you how to fix it, sorts of layering-

“What are the specific IoT applications that 5G will enable? What are the specific AR/VR applications? When you get a feel for some of those, you’ll start

seeing a lot of great capabilities coming out of the woodwork.”

PETER JARICH, VICE PRESIDENT FOR CONSUMER AND INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES AT CURRENT ANALYSIS







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on of information. And VR takes that a step further, creating complete virtual worlds.”

According to a Nokia spokesperson, 5G will open up a wealth of new possibilities by enabling a growing proliferation of devices to connect to the Internet and to one another—“from improved manufacturing efficiencies and vehicle safety to a cleaner environment.” At the Mobile World Congress 2016, Nokia highlighted several exciting 5G use cases, including massive capacity (“aggregation technologies will deliver record-breaking peak rates of 30Gbps”), massive connectivity (“5G will enable transformations in the cellular network to achieve record-breaking numbers of device connections

and connectivity with new technology innovations”), autonomous vehicles (“5G facilitates autonomous driving by providing ultra-low-latency connectivity for fast-moving autonomous systems”), robots (“an ultra-reliable, low-latency 5G network rapidly synchronizes interconnected robots steered by remote intelligence”), and a so-called “stadium experience” among connected users (“fast, live multi-casting with synchronous data transmission across a large number of smartphones”).

“When you think about 5G and IoT,” says Jarich, “you think about communications to a bunch of different devices. That’s when it becomes fun looking at 5G as a platform. Who knows what devices can be connected? The sky is the limit. Years ago, people would have laughed at you if you talked about connecting your pet to a cellular network for tracking purposes. But now these things are becoming real. What else haven’t we thought about doing because the cost is too high or the capabilities haven’t been there? Some of 5G’s use cases might not seem exciting at first glance, but the cost/capability ratio that 5G provides is finally making them feasible for larger numbers of consumers.” n

“…we will also see a good number of use cases enabled on the road to 5G with advancements in 4G LTE.”

SUSAN WELSH DE GRIMALDO, DIRECTOR, WIRELESS OPERATOR STRATEGIES AT STRATEGY ANALYTICS






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n2 Introduction








How the Internet of Things Will Be Built into 5GBy Jason Bovberg

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) networks are transforming industries by connecting all types of devices, appliances, systems, and services. The forthcoming 5G telecommunications standard promises a world where all these things are connected—and more. But what encompasses the 5G vision? How specifically will 5G support IoT?

Since its inception, the mobile industry has been feverishly innovating with radio technology standards that extract more bandwidth efficiency, capacity and data speeds from the available radio spectrum. This has culminated in second, third, and fourth generation (i.e., 2G, 3G, and 4G-LTE) technologies, which each deliver 10 times greater performance than their predecessors. However, the evolution from 4G LTE to 5G is different and broader in scope.

“In a nutshell,” says John Byrne, principal analyst for IoT at IDC, “the 5G vision is a new approach to

how we think about mobile broadband. There is still a focus on improving capacity and increasing the data rates that we currently see with the evolution in the LTE standard, but the differentiator with 5G is the ability to have a much more flexible architecture that is much more closely aligned with the evolving needs of customers.”

IoT highlights in 5G According to Deepak Boppana, director of product marketing at Lattice Semiconductor, the 5G vision is an end-to-end ecosystem that will enable a fully mobile and connected society. “IoT is one of the many use cases that 5G will support, enabling communication between massive numbers of sensors and connected devices,” he says. “The 5G standard will likely have a mix of air interfaces to support both high-speed, low-latency wireless IoT applications (e.g., mobile video surveillance) and low-speed, low-power, long-range IoT applications (e.g., smart cities, smart factories).”







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Byrne expands on that notion. “On one end of the continuum, 5G will need to be ultra-scalable to accommodate high-bandwidth applications such as HD video much more efficiently, and with lower latency than 3G and LTE. At the other end, where IoT exists, there are multiple requirements that 5G will be specifically designed to address.” These requirements include the following:

• Scalability. The 5G standard will need to support billions of devices, going well beyond traditional cellular M2M to include sensors, actuators, and seamless integration with other low-power wireless technologies.

• Battery. Batteries will need lifetimes in excess of 10 years.

• A programmable, software- and API-centric approach. Such a reality will enable enterprises to build IoT applications using many of the same IT tools they are familiar with on the Internet.

“Unlike scalability and battery life (which are already being somewhat addressed through the evolution of LTE),” says Byrne, “that last requirement is probably the biggest key to empowering an interconnected world because it enables developers to deploy network technology with much greater visibility into applications and with a greater ability to launch and monitor IoT deployments in a number of use-case scenarios.”

Phil Marshall, chief research officer at Tolaga Research, says 5G aims to be the “chameleon” technology for wireless. “At the heart of the 5G design criteria is a unified network architecture optimized to support the various wireless connectivity demands for emerging services and applications. It also includes a core network architecture that is agnostic to the underlying radio technologies used, and the diverse business models that are expected to be a hallmark of 5G. To achieve this, 5G needs to be a chameleon technology that can adapt to differing demands of wireless services, whether to support high bandwidth, low latency, bursty traffic, ultra-reliable services, or a combination of these capabilities.”

5G in the trenches What is it specifically about 5G (compared with earlier standards), technologically speaking, that will empower an interconnected world? According to Boppana, “5G will provide an order of magnitude improvement in data rates and end-to-end latency relative to 4G, enabling seamless connection between human-to-machine (e.g., smartphones, tablets) and M2M applications (e.g.,

“…the differentiator with 5G is the ability to have a much more flexible architecture that is much more closely aligned with the evolving needs of customers”

JOHN BYRNE, PRINCIPAL ANALYST, IOT, AT IDC







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autonomous cars, tactile internet, smart wearables). Key 5G technologies will include massive MIMO, millimeter-wave access, densification via small cells, and so on.”

The mobile industry’s target date for deploying 5G solutions into the marketplace is 2020. Until then, says Marshall, the industry will be busy innovating

technologies under the 5G umbrella and getting to the work of standardization. “This is further complicated by the broad agenda that is being pursued with 5G as it aims to unify wireless connectivity,” he says. “We expect that this will require the industry to prioritize technology developments with a bias toward compelling business cases rather than interesting use cases.” n






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Documents

March 2016 FierceWireless The 5G Vision: Preparing for the