Latin America. 5G will enable new services and applications that require lower latency, higher reliability, massive connection density, and more energy efficiency to make our connected lives and industries faster, smoother, and more efficient. 5G networks are being built with an architecture that will support the URLLC (Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communication) service category.
URLLC will support a number of advanced services for latency-sensitive connected devices to enable applications across a broad spectrum, such as factory automation, autonomous driving, industrial internet and smart grid.
5G Americas, the 5G and LTE industry and voice association for the Americas, published New Services & Applications With 5G Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication, whose work details the principles for achieving URLLC, explains the need for a new approach, and highlights the key requirements of URLLC services, with an emphasis on technical challenges and solutions.
"With the wide variety of unique services of 5G, the context of communications will expand to vehicles, high-speed trains, drones and industrial robots, and in all cases the agent of change will be URLLC. In the face of such advancement, mission-critical applications have demanding requirements for communications performance and reliability," said Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas. "To support that degree of complexity in communications, low latency is considered a crucial ingredient in URLLC as a key enabler in this new era of connectivity."
The 5G Americas report outlines the upcoming use cases of URLLC in intelligent transportation, industry automation, and tele-surgery, and presents the latency and reliability requirements for these applications. The paper also identifies potential bottlenecks in the latency of current cellular networks as well as future 5G networks, and presents the implementation blocks needed to achieve the required end-to-end latency reduction and thus support mission-critical applications. In addition, New Services & Applications With 5G Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication summarizes the recent results of the performance evaluation of basic 5G physical layer designs and implementations, multiple access layers, and air interface blocks essential to reduce latency and achieve desired reliability. It also addresses other potential latency reduction measures including Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC).
"While early commercial 5G deployments focus on optimized mobile broadband use cases, the future of 5G will include ultra-high reliability and/or low-latency functionalities. We are living in a time when mobile industries and verticals are undergoing rapid transformation, driven by critical communication capabilities," said Rao Yallapragada, Intel's Director of Advanced Technologies, and joint leader of the team that worked on URLLC at 5G Americas. "URLLC will unleash a range of innovative applications and digitize a legion of vertical industries that touch every aspect of human life."
New Services & Applications With 5G Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication was written by members of 5G Americas and is available for download at no cost on the 5G Americas website. Intel's Rao Yallapragada and Qualcomm's Jing Jiang led the working group with support from 5G Americas Board members who participated in the development of the work.
To download the file, click here.
