The first 5G standard is complete, what's next?

Latest update time：2018-04-07

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During the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC), Qualcomm and many global mobile communications companies jointly pledged to accelerate the global 5G new air interface standardization process, and facilitated 3GPP to reach a consensus at a subsequent meeting to accelerate the 5G new air interface Release 15 work plan. With the joint efforts of various working groups of the global standardization organization 3GPP, the world's first 5G standard was completed in December 2017, laying the foundation for the pre-commercialization of 5G in 2019, when consumers can also look forward to experiencing 5G smartphones.

So, what’s next in the 5G standardization process?

“One might think that the completion of the first 5G standard means that the heavy lifting of 5G R&D and standardization is almost over,” said Lorenzo Casaccia, vice president of technical standards at Qualcomm. “But the reality is that while we achieved a significant 5G standardization milestone last December, there is still a lot of work to be done to continue to drive the continued evolution and expansion of 5G to fully realize the $12.3 trillion 5G opportunity and make the 5G vision a reality.”

According to Ke Shiya, 3GPP has identified three important directions in continuing to promote 5G standardization, including:

1. Improve the 5G new air interface non-standalone deployment (NSA) specifications and use the existing LTE core network to achieve 5G commercial deployment

2. Formulate 5G new air interface independent deployment (SA) specifications based on the next-generation core network

3. Prepare for the evolution of 5G in 3GPP Release-16 and beyond to further expand the 5G ecosystem

Perfecting the first 5G new air interface specification and achieving commercial readiness

The Release-15 5G new air interface non-independent deployment standard completed in December last year focuses on providing enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services and lays the foundation for the design of 5G new air interface to support future evolution. But this is just the beginning, 3GPP is still further improving the Release-15 specification, focusing on fixing standard loopholes (called "modification requests" in 3GPP) to promote the commercial deployment of 5G products and services.

Qualcomm has been using its early prototypes that meet standards to conduct tests in real environments, and has been promoting the early commercialization of 5G through continuous feedback and improved product design. For example, Qualcomm has conducted industry-leading interoperability tests with many infrastructure manufacturers and global operators, and many mobile operators and terminal manufacturers in the industry have also announced that they will use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem for 5G testing and product design. In addition, within 3GPP, Qualcomm is one of the leading manufacturers in defining the 5G consistency test framework, which is another important aspect of achieving 5G pre-commercialization in 2019.

Formulate 5G new air interface independent deployment specifications

The 5G standard completed in December 2017 supports the 5G new air interface non-independent deployment specification, which refers to the use of existing LTE wireless and core networks as anchors for mobility management and network coverage, while adding 5G new air interface carriers.

The 5G standard, which was completed in December last year, aims to support large-scale 5G trials and pre-commercial use in 2019 based on the 5G NR non-standalone deployment specifications. Release-15 will include both 5G NR non-standalone and standalone deployments. 3GPP is currently developing the 5G NR standalone deployment specifications for Release-15, which will utilize the new next-generation 5G core network architecture (NGC) and is expected to be completed in June 2018. 5G NR non-standalone and standalone deployments will share the air interface physical layer specifications, and these common specifications were completed in December 2017. Therefore, the focus of 5G NR standalone deployment is to create an upper-layer architecture with user and control plane functions, and support the next-generation core network architecture, including network slicing, more refined QoS models, and more advanced security architectures.

Promoting the continuous evolution of standards, the ecosystem will further expand

The commercialization of 5G NR eMBB services is a huge step forward for the industry, but it is just the tip of the iceberg of the huge potential of 5G technology. 3GPP has already begun preparing for the evolution of 5G in 3GPP Release-16 and future releases. Just as LTE has evolved to incorporate many new features and use cases since its launch in 3GPP Release-8, 5G NR will also continue to evolve and expand.

3GPP Release-16 and its future versions will focus on expanding the mobile ecosystem to new areas, including new services and terminal types, new deployments and business models, and new frequency bands and spectrum types. 5G NR technology has a rich development roadmap in Release-16 and future versions (Figure 1), including low-latency high-reliability communications (5G NR URLLC), new spectrum sharing paradigms on unlicensed and shared spectrum (5G NR-U and 5G NR-SS), automotive communications in autonomous driving use cases (5G NR C-V2X), and the continued evolution of 3GPP low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies (NBIOT/eMTC). 3GPP has approved multiple research and work items for the next phase, and other related items will be approved in the coming months.

Figure 1: 3GPP 5G NR technology roadmap beyond eMBB

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