Road to 6G: 3GPP's Release 18 or 5G-Advanced

5G Advanced - AI Generated Photo (by Opera Aria) 

By the end of June, 2024 The 3GPP or the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, the organization responsible for developing protocols for mobile telecommunications, has introduced Release 18, also dubbed as 5G-Advanced after long work of 3 years. 

It should be reminded that in 2011 the 3GPP also used a similar 'Advanced' upgrade tactic during 4G-LTE days. LTE-Advanced came with Release 10 of 3GPP. 5G came with the 3GPP Release 15 in 2017. 

Interestingly as soon  as 5G-Advanced is launched, the specifications are already available to 5G equipment vendors. Telecom equipment vendors are happy to get it, as it would open a new road of revenue. 

The 3GPP is already working on next release and expects to bring Release 19 by end of 2025. One of the major telecom vendor, Ericsson noted that Release 19 promises to introduce a number of technological improvements to 5G-Advanced including boosting massive MIMO performance, further leveraging AI and machine learning technologies, and improving energy usage. 

Release 19 will serve as the bridge to 6G, where many solutions in Release 19 will provide the baseline for future 6G systems.

6G coming in 2030 (Photo Credit: Gemini AI)

As the timeline being targeted by the 3GPP, Release 20 will introduce more 5G technologies as well as to conduct an in-depth technical study of 6G RAN (radio access network) design. And the 3GPP's Release 21 will standardize 6G RAN specs for a commercial launch of 6G by 2030.

Nokia - new logo introduced in March 2023

Nokia was one of the main contributors to Release 18, as they contributed to various instrumental features, including enhancements for enabling efficient extended reality (XR) use and Immersive Voice and Audio Services (IVAS) codec support that create a spatial and improved listening experience. Nokia also drove the specifications to enhance RedCap, Nokia improved the uplink coverage and specified the timing as a service capabilities. Nokia led the specifications to enable flexibility to allow operation in dedicated spectrum allocations with bandwidths between 3 and 5MHz. And Nokia worked on network energy savings by defining a more dynamic and granular control of energy use of the base station under low-to-medium loading scenarios. 

Interestingly recently in an interview with ETTelecom, Harri Holma, Senior Advisor in Technology Office at Nokia’s Finland HQ, informed that Nokia is working with IISc, Bengaluru to invest in the country's 6G R&D. In 2023 Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark met with PM Modi and the company expects to work with Indian government on the Bharat 6G Vision project.  

Nokia and Ericsson both invested heavily in the 5G networks of Airtel and Jio. 

RedCap 5G NR

RedCap is abbreviation for Reduced Capabilities in 4G or 5G. This tech was conceptualized during Release 17 but it is getting traction in the era of 5G-NR (New Radio). 5G RedCap is also known as 5G NR-Light.

"5G RedCap is introduced to bridge the gap between 4G and 5G. The minimum 5G requirement earlier was 100 MHz bandwidth and 4 RX antennas. This was not suited for low-cost and battery-involved LPWA IoT applications. 5G RedCap is defined to power low complexity LTE and NR devices with minimum hardware requirement. It functions in the FR2 frequency range of 5G NR making a whole new band of frequencies available for current 4G devices and initiates the migration from 4G to 5G."

The use cases that motivate the specification work on NR RedCap include wearables (e.g. smart watches, wearable medical devices, AR/VR goggles, etc.), industrial wireless sensors, and video surveillance. 

These use cases have very different requirements than the low-power wide-area (LPWA) use cases currently addressed by the LTE-M and NB-IoT solutions. For example, the data rates need to be higher than for LPWA. Furthermore, there is a constraint on device form factor for certain wearable use cases. The consideration of use-case requirements drives the choices of key physical-layer parameters for RedCap. These choices have a direct impact on the complexity and cost of the device hardware platform. Ericsson foresee that RedCap devices will be positioned as a lower segment than eMBB, but higher than LPWA devices.

Features in 5G RedCap

• Lower Latency: 5G RedCap offers lower latency. Depending on the use cases, it can be as low as 5 ms. 

• Higher Peak Data Rate: 5G RedCap can provide faster peak data speeds, making it suitable for applications with maximum data throughout.

• Improved Power Consumption: 5G RedCap devices are either static or slow-moving, so reducing network monitoring activities can produce significant battery power savings.

• Bandwidth: RedCap uses a narrow bandwidth spectrum, 20MHz of bandwidth below 6GHz, far less than the typical 100MHz of 5G in eMBB.

• Antenna: 5G NR RedCap has reduced the number of transmitting and receiving antennas, MIMO layers, and the capability requirements of terminal RF transceivers and baseband processing modules.

• Modulation: RedCap defines the modulation mode of 64QAM (quadrature amplitude modification) at the highest level in the standard, but the terminal can flexibly support 256QAM too.

• Duplex: 5G NR RedCap adopts half-duplex FDD/ full-duplex Frequency Division Duplexing. It increases scheduling complexity as RedCap half-duplex devices do not monitor DL messages while communicating in UL.

Though India is yet see any private 5G network, I believe these private 5G networks will be based on RedCap. Network slicing, private 5G networks, upgrading to NSA core to SA core (for Airtel and Vi) are the things to be happen in future. 5G is yet to be monetized by Airtel and Jio, and RedCap can bring more opportunities for the Indian telcos. 

As BSNL and Jio use their own 4G/5G stack, I also expect that Indian tech companies would also give a fight to multinational telecom vendors for money.