IEEE 5G Tech Focus
Volume 1, Number 3, September 2017

In This Issue

• 5G "On the Fly"
• The Emergence of Experience Packages in the 5G Era
• LTE Goes Unlicensed: How the 5G Era Changes the Way We Use Spectrum
• Web 5G

 

5G "On the Fly" 

by Ahmed Bader, Insyab Wireless, and Mohamed-Slim Alouini, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Public safety and law enforcement organizations are looking forward to harness what 5G has to offer for their mission-critical applications. The perceived challenge however is the lack of sufficient business motivation for mobile operators to roll-out 5G infrastructure where mostly needed (hard-to-reach locations and disaster-struck regions). Could there be a way to set up temporary 5G services on the fly? Indeed, there is no better way to do it than using flying base stations. But first, backhaul challenges have to be addressed. This is the core concern of this article.

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The Emergence of Experience Packages in the 5G Era 

By Eirini Liotou, Nikos Passas, and Lazaros Merakos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Handling Quality of Experience as a mean opinion score is not sufficient to meet the requirements of the 5^th generation of communication networks. In this direction, the concept of “experience package” emerges. Experience packages may be configured and delivered in a way that fine-grained differentiation is achieved, respecting the user, application and communication context.

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LTE Goes Unlicensed: How the 5G Era Changes the Way We Use Spectrum 

by Shahid Mumtaz, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal, Jonathan Rodriguez , Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal, and Zhenyu Zhou, North China Electric Power University, Beijing

Spectrum extension beyond the current licensed charts is one of the most important endeavors for mobile operators to meet the ever-increasing traffic demand. From a 3GPP perspective, the network capacity can be increased by improving the spectral efficiency of the LTE-based cellular system through higher order modulation, massive MIMO, mmWave and carrier aggregation, to name a few. However, the current amount of spectrum allocated by ITU to LTE-based cellular systems is insufficient until new spectrum is available in WRC-19. For example, it is estimated that there is a spectrum shortage of at least 63 MHz in China, and a similar problem can be seen worldwide. Considering GHz unlicensed band, telecom carriers have already made their decision to exploit this underutilized bulk of spectrum using an additional interface integrated to the LTE-based cellular system. This provides an additional 500 MHz of spectrum on a global basis [2] in a band that has so far been occupied only by WiFi. In 3GPP LTE Release 13, the Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) proposed to enable LTE operators to offload their traffic into the 5GHz band and leverage their bitrates by aggregating licensed/unlicensed carriers while still offering seamless mobility support. Early attempts to use LTE in unlicensed spectrum were not standardized and included the use of new algorithms and methods that did not consider regional regulatory restrictions for each given country. One such pre-standards solution is LTE-U (LTE in the unlicensed band) which received limited acceptance. LAA specification intends to produce a single global solution framework for licensed assisted access to the unlicensed spectrum (5 GHz). Such a solution considers regional power limits while enabling LTE to use low power secondary cells in the unlicensed spectrum using carrier aggregations.

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Web 5G 

by Dominique Hazael-Massieux, W3C, and Dr. Jeff Jaffe, W3C

The advent of fifth generation (5G) networks creates opportunities to leverage network resources in new ways. Application platforms must also evolve to take advantage of very low latency, high throughput, and wide coverage for voice recognition, 3D video, UHD screens, virtual augmented reality, automation, smart cities/buildings, self-driving cars and other powerful applications. In this paper, we examine current and envisioned enhancements to the Open Web Platform that we believe will be essential to realizing the full potential of 5G.

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