This week, the quarterly 3GPP RAN Plenary Meeting in San Diego, California, marks two important milestones that will take us another step closer to our vision for 5G — a unifying connectivity fabric that will expand the reach of mobile to new services, deployments, and spectrum types:

The first milestone was the completion of the 5G NR specifications for standalone (SA) mode. It is the culmination of the joint efforts from the different 3GPP working groups (RAN — Radio Access Network, SA — System Aspects, and CT — Core network & Protocols) and is an addition to the 5G NR non-standalone (NSA) mode that was completed late last year, which leverages the LTE core network. This new set of specifications will allow 5G NR to be deployed with the 5G core network, enabling new end-to-end features, from network slicing to more granular QoS support. As always, details will be ironed out and bugs will be fixed; however, the timely completion of this milestone proves that 3GPP can deliver on schedule and confirms that both the SA and NSA mode are ready for commercial deployments next year.
The second milestone was the approval of a package of new projects for the second phase of 5G, which will shape 3GPP Release 16 specifications. Some of the new projects are about incremental enhancements for mobile broadband, while many other projects will focus on the expansion of 5G to support new use cases, building upon Release 15’s flexible framework. The 5G expansion will be primarily based on 5G NR but will also include LTE components. Now, I’ll move on to provide a short overview of these new 5G projects.

5G NR enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) improvements

The foundational 5G NR technologies have been defined as part of Release 15, but as always, 3GPP continues to improve the core technologies to deliver better user experiences. In this vein, many Release 16 projects were approved to further enhance mobile broadband, and these include device power consumption optimization in connected mode, NR-NR dual connectivity, network interference management, MIMO and Multi-Transmission Point improvements (mostly for 5G NR and in a smaller measure, LTE), mobility enhancements (5G NR and LTE), and self-organizing networks (SON) for NR. These are in addition to the study on Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), which has been ongoing already for some time. Finally, an initial exploration of the usage of 5G NR in high frequency bands (above 52.5GHz) will commence.

5G NR private network and URLLC for the Industrial IoT (IIoT)

An important project approved this week, in conjunction with related projects in the 3GPP SA groups, marks the expansion of 5G NR to IIoT use cases that will power the wirelessly connected reconfigurable factory of the future. The combination of those projects will include an array of enhancements going from the lower layers, for example, using CoMP techniques to meet reliability requirements within a time-bounded latency target, to protocol aspects, for example, supporting wireless industrial ethernet over 5G NR and system architecture aspects. Our commitment to this space is not new. At MWC 2018 in Barcelona, we had an industry-first demonstration of wireless PROFINET industrial ethernet over 5G NR that supports ultra-low latency down to 1ms. To learn more, be sure to watch our webinar from a week ago.