3GPP RAN WG meeting in Taiwan: January 21 – 25, 2019: NTT DOCOMO’s URLLC Use Cases

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:

Case Use-case Reliability Latency Data packet size and traffic model Description
1 Factory automation

@ 30GHz

99.9999 (%) 2ms for end-to-end

1ms for air-interface

DL & UL: 32 bytes

Periodic and deterministic traffic model with data arrival interval 2ms

Motion control
2 Factory automation

@ 4GHz

99.9999 (%) 2ms for end-to-end

1ms for air-interface

DL & UL: 32 bytes

Periodic and deterministic traffic model with data arrival interval 2ms

Motion control
3 Rel.15 enabled use-case in indoor hotspot

@ 4GHz

99.9 (%) 7ms for air-interface DL & UL: 4096 bytes

FTP model 3

AR/VR
4 Rel.15 enabled use-case in urban macro

@ 4GHz

99.999 (%) 1ms for air-interface DL & UL: 32 bytes

FTP model 3

Sporadic traffic
5 Power distribution

@ 700MHz

UL/DL SINR CDF only

 

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.

4 thoughts on “3GPP RAN WG meeting in Taiwan: January 21 – 25, 2019: NTT DOCOMO’s URLLC Use Cases

  1. 3GPP Release 16, when completed (early 2020?), will have the ultra low latency included. It is NOT available in any so called “5G” networks till then! So don’t expect ultra low latency on any “5G” smartphone for several years. Note also that 1 way latency is the cumulative delay through: the access network, mobile packet core, and edge network at the service provider point of presence. It is NOT just the access network (e.g. 5G NR transmission).

    Title: Study on physical layer enhancements for NR ultra-reliable and low latency case (URLLC)
    Status: Draft
    Type: Technical specification (TS)
    Initial planned Release: Release 16

    The follow key use cases were identified to be considered:
    – Release 15 enabled use case improvements
    – Such as AR/VR (Entertainment industry)
    – New Release 16 use cases with higher requirements
    – Factory automation
    – Transport Industry, including the remote driving use case
    – Electrical Power Distribution

    https://portal.3gpp.org/desktopmodules/Specifications/SpecificationDetails.aspx?specificationId=3498

  2. NTT Docomo Pacific reveals 5G Open Lab, invites businesses to experiment with faster network

    Docomo Pacific revealed Guam’s first 5G test lab Wednesday at their Tamuning headquarters, where worldwide and local business partners can experiment with a 5G environment.

    “5G is everything we’re doing now, just faster and better,” said Docomo Pacific CEO and president Rod Boss. “This lab is really the first step to developing 5G.”

    A 5G network is not available to customers yet, he said. The lab space is meant to further the development of a 5G network on Guam and connect local businesses with the service.

    “Remember what it was like when you got your first cell phone or your first internet connection?” Boss said. “It took 10 minutes, 20 minutes to download one episode of something, then it went only taking a minute, now we’re impatient if it takes 5 seconds. What 5G will bring us, is that it’ll happen instantaneous.”

    This improved 5G network, he said, provides a platform for efficient applications, such as Smooth Space, a video-conference app.

    https://www.guampdn.com/story/money/2019/03/27/docomo-pacific-reveals-5-g-open-lab-guam/3283424002/

  3. Here is the latest status of URLLC in the RAN in the 3GPP Release 16 specification as of 6 January 2023:

    Physical Layer Enhancements for NR Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communication (URLLC) NR_L1enh_URLLC 1 Rel-16 R1 6/15/2018 12/22/2022 96% complete RP-19158

    UE Conformance Test Aspects – Physical Layer Enhancements for NR URLLC NR_L1enh_URLLC-UEConTest 2 Rel-16 R5 12/14/2020 12/22/2022 90% complete RP-202566 RP-221485

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