NSN 5G White Paper
NSN 5G White Paper
NSN 5G White Paper
FutureWorks
CONTENTS
1.
2.
Use cases
2.1
Mobile broadband
2.2
Automotive
2.3
Smart Society
2.4
Smart grids
2.5
Health
10
2.6
Industrial
10
2.7
10
3.
5G Design Principles
10
3.1
Flexibility
10
3.2
Reliability
11
4.
Requirements
12
5.
Summary
15
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3G
2G
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The low data rate services provided by 2G systems did not fulfill the
need for mobile Internet access. This lead to a demand for new 3G
standards, which evolved to provide fast data services and more
capacity for voice. The recent (4G) mobile communications system LTE
was developed to provide high capacity and highest rate data service
for mobile multimedia. Seen from a historical point of view, each of
the cellular standards has evolved around a set of key use cases:
1G Voice services
2G Improved voice and text messaging
3G Integrated voice and affordable mobile Internet
4G High capacity mobile multimedia
Real-time control
NextGen Media
Tactile
MTC
Monitoring &
sensing
Tactile
1ms
Visual
4G
Multimedia
10ms
3G
M2M
Audio
Text
2G
100ms
Voice
Flexibility for
what is
unknown today.
1G
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Of course, the term Zero latency does not mean no delay at all
it simply represents the fact that 5G needs to deliver latencies
low enough that the radio interface will not be the bottleneck, even
for the most challenging use cases. The next generation mobile
communications system will not be used for human interaction alone.
Instead we will see a huge growth in machine type communications,
sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things. The devices will
also not only be remotely controlled and managed by people, but
will also communicate with one another. Therefore the Internet of
Things requires more reliable communication links but also lower
transmission delays (latencies) machines can simply process
information much faster than people.
Human interactions will also be more demanding in the future for
the 2G system, the main focus was voice, where latency requirements
were driven by the human audible delay constraint, in the order of
100 milliseconds. For multimedia applications, the human eye is more
sensitive and delays of less than 10 milliseconds are required. The
tactile interaction stands for the increasing use of touch interfaces,
where a delay requirement as low as one millisecond can sometimes
be observed.
Gigabit experience will mean data reception and transmission
speeds of Gigabits per second to users and machines. Again, this
does not mean providing high-capacity networks everywhere, but the
centers of big cities will be the first places where the demand for a
new system will be felt. The overall demand growth in both user data
rates and network capacity is still the main driver for technological
evolution higher capacities of networks will require better
performance, cell densification and access to new, broader carriers
in new spectrum. Part of the capacity growth can of course be met
with existing systems, but around 2020, limits will be reached and 5G
technologies will be needed.
NSN has already published a white paper describing our general
views on what 5G will be and in this current white paper we will look
more closely at the use cases for the new system and the resulting
requirements.
The next section describes a number of new use cases envisioned
for 5G. Flexibility for a wide range of these use cases and services will
be one of the key design principles for the next generation mobile
communications systems. The 5G requirements supporting these
demands will be summarized at the end of this paper.
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2. Use Cases
New services and use cases are envisioned for 5G and will likely be the
driver for the technology. Figure 3 shows the diversity of some of the
expected 5G services.
Throughput
Gigabytes in a second
3D video 4K screens
Work and play in the cloud
Augmented reality
Sensor NW
# of devices;
Cost; Power
A trillion of devices with different needs
Latency;
Reliability
GB transferred in an instant
Building a
scalable
service
experience
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Data will be one of the key drivers for 5G and in new parts of this
system we may for the first time see no dedicated voice service - in
5G, voice is expected to be handled as an application, simply using
the data connectivity provided by the communication system. Data is
growing at a rate between 25% and 50% annually and is expected to
continue towards 2030. See Figure 4.
Traffic growth towards 2030
100,000
Relative growth
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
2010
Up to 1000x traffic
growth may be met
through LTE-A evolution
2012
2014
2016
2018
2020
2022
2024
2026
2028
2030
Year
Traffic volume per subscriber
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2.2 Automotive
The automotive sector is expected to be a very important new driver
for 5G, with many use cases for mobile communications for vehicles.
For example, entertainment for passengers requires simultaneous
high capacity and high mobility mobile broadband, because
future users will expect to continue their good quality connection
independent of their location and speed.
Other use cases for the automotive sector are augmented reality
dashboards. These display overlay information on top of what a driver
is seeing through the front window, identifying objects in the dark and
telling the driver about the distances and movements of the objects.
The previous two use cases are related to content provisioning for the
car users, but the cars themselves will also be connected. Many car
manufacturers are already adding driver assistance systems based
on 3D imaging and built-in sensors. In the future, wireless modules
will enable communication between vehicles themselves, information
exchange between vehicles and supporting infrastructure and
between vehicles and other connected devices, for example, those
carried by pedestrians. Additionally, use cases for traffic safety are
now widely discussed in the EU-funded project METIS. These include
cars detecting safety critical situations, such as black ice, accidents
within reach of the car and other hazardous road conditions. Safety
systems will also guide drivers on alternative courses of action to allow
them to drive more safely and lower the risks of accidents.
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2.5 Health
The health sector has many applications that can benefit from mobile
communications. Communications systems enable telemedicine,
which provides clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate
distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that
would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities.
It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations.
Wireless sensor networks based on mobile communication can provide
remote monitoring & sensors for parameters such as heart rate and
blood pressure.
2.6 Industrial
Wireless and mobile communications are becoming increasingly
important for industrial application. Wires are expensive to install and
maintain and the possibility of replacing cables with reconfigurable
wireless links is a tempting opportunity for many industries.
However, achieving this requires that the wireless connection works
with a similar delay, reliability and capacity as cables and that its
management is simplified. Low delays and very low error probabilities
are new requirements that need to be addressed with 5G.
3. 5G Design Principles
The new, 5th generation of mobile will be built around two key design
principles that guide all requirements and technical solutions.
3.1 Flexibility
The use cases for 5G will be more diverse than ever and will require
very diverse link characteristics. Some examples are:
Massive data transmissions require large packet sizes and a lot of
allocated resources
Non-stationary sensors may need only small packet sizes and rare
resource allocations but in turn require a battery efficient sleep
mode
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3.2 Reliability
As a key design principle for 5G, reliability is related to flexibility with the flexible integration of different technology components,
we will see a step away from best effort mobile broadband towards
truly reliable communication. Reliability is not only about equipment
up-time, it also relates to the perception of infinite capacity and
coverage that future mobile networks need to deliver. This in principle
means that for all the use cases and the vast majority of the users,
the required data will be received in the required time and will not be
dependent on the technology used.
Furthermore, reliability is becoming more critical as we start to
relay on mobile communications for control and safety. A reliable
connection can be defined as the probability of a certain data package
being decoded correctly within a certain timeframe. This means
that retransmission may be needed to ensure reception of a correct
data package, a process which will inevitably delay the transmission.
Therefore, even to obtain LTE latency numbers with higher reliability, a
lower system delay will be required.
Putting reliability as a key design principle for 5G means that:
in all concepts of system design focus should be put on fairness
the requirement is expressed in % of the users and not the
locations/coverage, because even the reliable network needs to be
cost-effective for the service providers
the mechanisms for trade-off between link reliability (so low packet
error rate) and throughput and/or latency are introduced in a simple
and efficient way
multiple network layers and radio access technologies are used to
provide the most reliable link based on the users application needs,
location and mobility
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4. Requirements
The use cases, key design principles and vision of the 5G system lead
to requirements that the future mobile broadband system will need
to meet.
10,000 times more traffic will need to be carried through all mobile
broadband technologies at some point between 2020 and 2030.
We made our prediction in 2010 and since then have gathered
information from the market which shows that the growth we foresaw
is actually happening. The need for more capacity goes hand-in-hand
with access to more spectrum on higher carrier frequencies. The new
5G system needs to be designed in a way that enables deployment in
new frequency bands.
We will see growth between ten and a hundred devices for each mobile
communications user even now many people have a phone, tablet,
laptop and a few Bluetooth-enabled devices. This trend will continue
and 5G needs to be designed to accommodate such growth in device
numbers.
Another factor is radio latency lower than one millisecond, which is
important for:
achieving high data rates while keeping equipment cost low
ensuring fast procedure response times in the system (e.g. fast
wake up and dormancy, fast scheduling, fast link reconfiguration)
a whole new range of use cases like remote control of machines and
objects in the cloud or tactile Internet
The requirement for low radio latency is followed by other
requirements - jitter (latency deviation) of 20s or end-to-end latency
targets that vary between different service types.
x more traffic
x more devices
millisecond
latency
Capacity
Latency
Performance
requirements
years M2M
battery life
Energy
consumption
Cost
User
data rates
Gbit/s
peak data rates
Mbit/s
wherever needed
Coverage
Ultra
reliability
The exploration
phase for a
high
performance
5G has started!
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5. Summary
The number of use cases for a next generation mobile
communications system will grow rapidly and the scenarios will place
much more diverse requirements on the system. In this White Paper
we have outlined the use cases and requirements for 5G but also the
key design principles flexibility and reliability. The future may seem
far ahead but the phase for defining the requirements is now and
whats more, any new technology or system that we design for 5G
needs to be future proof and last at least until 2030.
5G will come and even though we are still in an exploratory phase, NSN
is already setting out what 5G will deliver and how it will deliver it.
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