3GPP RAN WG meeting in Taiwan: January 21 – 25, 2019:

A five-day working group meeting of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) RAN WG opened in Taiwan on Monday January 21, 2019, with 459 registered delegates attending.   The goal of the meeting is to progress 3GPP Release 16 which will include an important IMT 2020 Use Case:  Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC).  I counted over a dozen contributions on the URLLC topic at this 3GPP meeting’s document list which can be accessed here.

Services for latency sensitive devices for applications like factory automation, autonomous driving, and remote surgery. These applications require sub-millisecond latency with error rates that are lower than 1 packet loss in 10⁵ packets [ITU-R M.2410.0]. New techniques need to be devised to meet the stringent latency and reliability requirements for URLLC.

An interesting 3GPP RAN meeting contribution on Views and evaluations for URLLC scenarios by Kazuaki Takeda of NTT DOCOMO will be presented this week.  In that contribution, NTT DOCOMO selected the following cases for evaluation:

There are high interests on supporting industrial IoT type of services at local area using carrier frequencies of around 4GHz and 30GHz [2]. It would be possible to evaluate NR performance in this type of scenario by simulating case 1, case 2, and case 3. For AR/VR type of services in a specific local area, it is not sure whether all the packets should be delivered as URLLC packets, or some specific type of packets (e.g., control packet) for AR/VR service should only be delivered as URLLC packets (i.e., other types of packets for AR/VR service can be delivered as eMBB). The simple way is to treat all the packets as URLLC packets as the evaluation assumption. Case 3 can be viewed as representing such situation. For emergency type of services in wide area, it can be represented by case 4. As the case 5, we partly evaluate the wide area performance at 700MHz.

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Taiwan 5G Commercialization Summit

In conjunction with the referenced 3GPP working group meeting, the Taiwan 5G Commercialization Summit organized by Taiwanese entities was also held in Taipei on Monday, January 21st.  The organizers of the Taiwan 5G summit were: MediaTek, Chunghwa Telecom, the Taiwan Association of Information and Communications Standards, and the 5G Office of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢), the head of iPhone assembler Pegatron Corp and a private sector group advising the government’s national innovation/new economy task force, said 5G technology is expected to drive sophisticated applications of the future such as smart medical care and the Internet of Vehicles.  Many of those new applications will require URLLC.

Mr. Tung urged the Taiwan government to update regulations to meet the needs of a fast-changing telecom environment and prevent Taiwan from lagging behind other countries in 5G development.  As long as Taiwan is successful in 5G development, it will create major commercial opportunities for the local Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, he added.

Since January 2018, Chunghwa Telecom has teamed up with the MOEA’s 5G Office, and the government-sponsored Institute for Information Industry (III) and Industrial Technology Research Institute in a 5G development alliance.