Qualcomm's 5G roadmap for cellular, IoT
>> Qualcomm outlines 5G roadmap for cellular, IoT
Rick Merritt
Silicon Valley Bureau Chief
EE Times
03 Nov 2015
eetimes.com
Qualcomm has begun drafting its concepts for a novel radio technology needed for cellular, including a low power protocol for the Internet of Things (). The company is one of dozens sketching their own proposals due in March for the first round of 5G standards work.
An initial phase of standards for next-generation cellular networks are expected to be released in late 2018 with a second phase a year later. The 3GPP group oversees much of the work held a kick-off meeting in late September where 550 delegates heard presentations from a 70 companies and organisations working to define 5G.
"We are designing a network for a future we don't know," said John Smee, a senior director of engineering at Qualcomm Research, heading up the company's technical work on 5G. "It's like our work on 4G ten years ago when people carried flip phones to the meetings and thought about a network capable of downloading video," he stated.
The 5G vision spans a variety of uses from smartphones to new low- latency mission critical services to drones and head-mounted displays. "You see people thinking beyond the smartphone, so it's an interesting time of reflection," said Smee.
5G will require a new air interface to support a variety of higher bandwidth and lower latency services. For its part, Qualcomm is proposing a family of interfaces mostly based on existing orthogonal frequency-division modulation (OFDM), but adding support for multi-user massive MIMO for higher spectrum bands and a non-orthogonal technique it calls Resource Spread Multiple Access (RSMA) for lower bands and IoT uses.
"It's not a new waveform but an expansion of OFDM for wider use cases with a family of numerologies with scaled tone spacing," said Smee. "No one numerology fits all use cases, but a family of three or four numerologies [can provide] a checkerboard of design parameters to let systems be optimised" for different cell sizes and frequency bands, he said.
The approach includes support for a multiplexing technique that would let transmissions demanding low latency pre-empt other traffic. In this way 5G is expected to open up new uses in industrial and medical applications, for example.
A Release 15 standard in late 2018 could set the stage for 5G cellular services starting in 2020, Qualcomm noted.
RSMA pitched as 5G IoT protocol
Qualcomm proposes its RSMA technology as an exception to OFDM for IoT. The company believes its approach will enable devices to transmit small amounts of data with minimal signaling overhead, using a single carrier for some uplinks. RSMA supports mobile devices as well as mesh networking on downlinks and “network-assisted” meshing on uplink traffic.
Developed by Qualcomm, RSMA “uses time- and frequency-spreading rather than providing a guarantee of orthoginality,” said Smee. The approach overlaps users in “a more optimal way to save power on devices and make the network more efficient,” he added.
The approach also points to the race to embedded intellectual property in the 5G standards, something crucial for many companies including Qualcomm. “The chip part of the company does a bit better than break even, but most of the profits still come from licensing,” said Will Strauss, principal of market watcher Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.).
Smee acknowledged companies are already developing a wide variety of approaches for IoT on 5G networks. The 3GPP recently weeded out two of the many proposals already in the works for IoT on 4G cellular.
Qualcomm wants the 3GPP to define licensed and unlicensed 5G services below 6 GHz in its first phase, still relying on 4G for control and other tasks. It proposes leaving millimeter wave services and a new 5G anchor network until the 2019 release.
The technical debates are beginning at a time when regulators have yet to decide what millimeter wave bands they will open for 5G. Final decisions are not expected until the World Radiocommunications Conference in 2019, leaving engineers starting to work on 5G channel testing in the dark.
“For researchers doing measurements, it’s too early to pick a winner,” although strong beam tracking will be needed to make up for limited reach, Smee said.
Indeed, it’s still early days. Ninety percent of today’s LTE base stations still use Release 4 of the standard, said analyst Strauss. Apple’s new iPhone 6 does support Release 6 and Qualcomm has announced support for Release 12 but the first 5G standard is not expected until Release 15.
“I am very skeptical there will be any 5G networks up and running on a wide-scale basis in 2020,” said Strauss.
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- Eric L - |
