You may wonder why I’m writing about Dual Connectivity. After all, it comes from LTE in Rel-12, when we are currently within the Rel-16/17 timeframe. The reason for this is that the DC from LTE is treated as a baseline. The enhanced version is incorporated within 5G as one of the main features to allow the so-called Multi-RAT DC (MR-DC). If we look from a broader perspective, we have a multitude of use cases for DC, including LTE-DC, NR-DC, LTE-NR-DC, NR-LTE-DC, LWA. Therefore, this post aims at shedding light on the different aspects of DC, being the legacy feature, which can be extrapolated towards the current situation. 

3GPP Release 17 is about to be started soon. It will mostly be about enhancing and “further” enhancing 5G features in different areas. Regarding the overall timeline, the content of Rel-17 is to be defined in Q4 2019, and the aim is to froze it in Q3 2021.

The “history” of 3GPP system “entering” the unlicensed spectrum regime seems to happened already a long time ago. Tight LTE interworking with WiFi is one way for the MNOs to offload traffic. The other one, discussed within this blogpost, is based on a specialized design of LTE system to be able to cope with ISM/license exempt bands’ special requirements e.g., fair coexistence with other users of this spectrum (e.g. Legacy WiFi).

This post focuses on the selected Study Items that 3GPP has chosen for Rel-16 including: V2X, SON, NOMA, Unlicensed Spectrum Access and beyond 52.6GHz, and more.

This year we have seen the rapid standardization of 3GPP Rel-15, 5G-NR, laying the foundation for the first 5G networks. This blogpost, discusses the ideas and enhancements that are currently being worked on for 3GPP Release-16. These enhancements cover not only 5G-NR, but also LTE which is being advanced in parallel.

Our team – Marcin Dryjański, Marcin Biały and my humble person – went on a trip to London on June 11, where at the invitation of Knect365 (Informa Business), we participated in the Tech XLR8 fair in London. At this event, as part of the 5G World Series, Marcin Dryjanski had the pleasure to chair the 5G Standards & Spectrum Focus Day workshop.

In today’s blogpost we will discuss how the interworking architecture of the new 5G system with the existing LTE systems looks like. Inter-working between 4G and 5G will play a very important role in the early deployment of 5G system, which will rely on LTE to be the anchor or underlying system. In the standalone (SA) deployment of 5G, good inter-working with the LTE system to facilitate inter-RAT mobility between the two RATs will be required.

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a secure, reliable, and efficient type of Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) Technology that was standardized by 3GPP in Release 13 (LTE Advanced Pro) and uses licensed spectrum.

2017 was a very exciting year with a lot of new technological trends emerging such as 5G, IoT, MTC, SDN, etc. We tried to cover a vast variety of topics in our blog posts and also introduced the Grandmetric Guidepaper to get deeper understanding of the technological concepts.

eMTC (aka LTE Cat-M, while in fact, CAT-M is just a definition of UE type/category supporting eMTC) is a low power wide area (LPWA) wireless technology developed by the 3GPP to address the growing need for a solution to address the requirements for IoT applications and Machine-Type Communication (MTC) in terms of cost and power consumption reduction without any significant change to the current LTE deployment.