Tag: NR

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.

It was a very interesting event, despite being small in the number of participants. We could listen about the current 5G status from different angles including perspectives from vendors, solution providers, verticals, standardization, governments and research. The one I was missing though, was the MNO “reality check”. I believe that the industry reached now the time, when we are slightly moving beyond the 5G hype and switch from “5G is the answer – now, what was the question” to “who pays for the new infrastructure and spectrum”, being the reality check.

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.

In this post we discuss the complexity that 5G brings and show some examples of this as compared to LTE including: naming in the 5GS architecture, dual connectivity options in 5G, parameters for L1, base station naming, spectrum aspects.

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.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the differences between LTE and 5G in the area of functional splits between RAN and Core Network. We show and discuss high level splits of selected functionalities of the main “network functions/nodes” in both systems (discussing it from the 3GPP RAN3 WG perspective) from which we can make some conclusions on the differences between those two systems.

LTE-Advanced Pro1 was defined within Rel-13, but the standardization didn’t stop there. Further LTE enhancements have been introduced in Rel-14 and recently started Rel-15. In parallel to LTE evolution, both releases initialized, the first set of study and work items towards 5G.  While Rel-14 focused solely on 5G study items, the normative work for the […]