This is my personal digital portal. I am into wireless technology, standardization and passionate about programming. Posts in my portal are explicitly personal opinion and is not endorsement of my current or previous employers.
The portal is the home for my blog posts and articles in addition to those that I usually post on #LinkedIn, Medium or twitter.
Sendil Kumar
Official 5G - The technology recognized and recommended by ITU-R to be deployed in IMT spectrum bands, that has been built to meet the requirments of new generation. Once in every 10 years, ITU-R meets to identify new requirements and vision of next generation of IMT technology. IMT-2000, IMT-Advanced (2010), IMT-2020 (2020) and next will be in 2030!.
Among all the generations of mobile technology, #5G has made lot of momentum and expectations from the technology right from the day when it was chalked out on a whiteboard.
3GPP is the only standardization body which had actively started developing specifications in 2015 that can deliver the wish-list of the IMT-2020. 3GPP technologies 2G,3G,4G have been widely adopted by all cellular operators in all countries. 3GPP kick starts its 5G standards development by the landmark RAN 5G workshop -”Start of Something” in Sept 2015 in USA. The workshop summary is available in [2]. More than 550 members participated with 70 presentations !!. Major operators, equipment manufacturers contributed in the workshop. Suprisingly no companies or organization from India contributed to this workshop !!
There is one more wirelesss technology that we use in our day-to-day life - WiFi a standard developed by IEEE. WiFi is based on 802.11 series (802.11a/b/g/n/ac) specifications. WiFi technology dont fall under the category of IMT (lack cellular mobility support). IEEE had developed WiMAX (802.16m) which supported mobility and is also an IMT-Advanced (official 4G) technology. WiMAX lost market adoption and failed to become a global cellular technology.
IEEE 802 standards group formed formed a standing committee IEEE 802 EC 5G / IMT-2020 standing committee to assess (by July 2016)[4]:
Finally, IEEE decided NOT to develop and submit a IEEE based 5G candidate technology to ITU-R IEEE being such a large member driven body did a good homework before spending time to develop specifications for IMT2020 requirements !!
Almost during the finalization (around Mid 2017) of “Evaluation Methdologies report” and “Minimum Performance requirements report”, India submitted a new mandatory “configuration to be simulated” for a rural and also defined a corresponding minimal spectral efficiency requirement. (Press Release Global body nod to India's LMLC configuration)
One of the organizational partner of 3GPP submitted its intention to submit a 3GPP Rel 15 based specifications as another candidate technology for 5G [5]. And also informed that final submission of the entire specification along with self-evaluation report in the required format will be submitted by meeting#32 in Brazil (July 2019)
Forum of members inside ETSI submitted its intention to submit a candidate technology to ITU-R. [6]. Based on this initial submission, it seemed like DECT forum was developing a new DECT specifications (non-3GPP) that can meet all the IMT2020/5G requirments of eMBB, URLLC and mMTC. DECT is well known in the fixed cordless phone ecosystem.
In the IEEE 802 AANI SC group, some of the members (like broadcomm, NuFront) continued to assess the capability of IEEE 802.11ax to meet some of the IMT2020 requirements. These discussions continued in July, Sept and Nov meetings in 2018 to propose 802.11ax as complimentary solution for some of the environment like Indoor Hotspot and Dense Urban. IEEE and 3GPP exchanged LS to participate together for the ITU-R submission. In May 2019, NuFront proposed a joint candidate technology (IEEE 802.11ax and EUHT) submission to ITU-R. (See [16])
NuFront - A private company from China submitted a new candidate technology “EUHT” to the final
meeting[8] . Their website have products they had developed in China and deployed in some scenarios
(non-cellular) [9]. The company also claims to have developed the technology in 2010 and EUHT as chinese
national standard.
During that time even the Vision was not developed for IMT2020
Declared that their technology will have two radio technologies[10] - a) 3GPP NR (since ETSI owns copyrights of 3GPP being an OP) and - b) DECT 2020 specifications developed for URLLC and mMTC usages/requirements
In the final submission [11], included a technically modified versions of 3GPP NR and 3GPP LTE !!. The modified specifications were a mix various releases of 3GPP NR Rel 15.5 and 3GPP LTE Rel 15.x.
Candidate technology from DECT,TSDSI & NuFront were approved based on the revised submission before the extended deadline 10th Sept 2019.
All technology being different, the ITU-R has setup a common methdology [17] to evaluate (simulate, analytical,etc) multiple performance metrics. Usually, they are configuration paramters like frequency, height of the basestations, transmit power to be used by all technology.
All the candidate technologies are expected to be self-assessment (by proponents) and also indepdently by various voluntary groups.All self-evaluation has to strictly follow these methodology in their evaluation.
Multiple independent evaluation groups submitted their final assessment report about these candidate technologies. Do these technologies really meet official 5G requirement?
All the IEGs concluded that the 3GPP LTE & NR technology met all the requirements of 5G
ITU-R process for "recommendation of official 5G" is not about competition among the candidate technologies, but some submission reports contained extra results and claims about candidate technologies. ITU-R had strictly limited the discussion and endorsement to parts of the reports that have used configurations set by ITU-R.
there is either no performance gains or insignificant gains due to technical modifications introduced by TSDSI-RIT on the original 3GPP specification.
Due to the inconclusive results regarding DECT 2020 NR & NuFront - EUHT assessment reports, ITU-R decided to give once again an exceptional extended time during the June 2020 meeting for assessment of these two candidate technology. These two technologies will be again assessed by independent evaluation groups and if they are found to meet all the requirements they get to be included in the official 5G recommendation in 2021. Whereas both 3GPP and TSDSI will make to the official 5G recommendations by Nov 2020
In the final meetings held in Oct and Nov 2020, ITU-R approved three technologies as IMT-2020. The technologies approved can be found in Annex of ITU-R Recommendation M.2150