Unmanned Systems Technology 024 | Wingcopter 178 l 5G focus l UUVs insight l CES report l Stromkind KAT l Intelligent Energy fuel cell l Earthsense TerraSentia l Connectors focus l Advanced Engineering report

40 Focus | 5G communications February/March 2019 | Unmanned Systems Technology The 3GPP specification group launched its 5G standardisation work in September 2015. The first step was a study phase in Release 14 that focused on 5G scenarios and requirements, leading to the first 5G specification version, Release 15, in June in 2018. There are 25 different studies in Release 16, from multimedia priority service, vehicle-to-everything application layer services and 5G satellite access to local area network support in 5G, wireless and wireline convergence, and novel radio techniques. Further items being studied include security, codecs and streaming services, local area network interworking, network slicing and the IoT. Technical reports (the result of the study phase) are also being developed to broaden the applicability of 3GPP technology to non-terrestrial radio access, initially via satellite but also airborne base stations on high-altitude autonomous UAVs and to maritime applications (intra-ship, ship-to- shore and ship-to-ship) which will be important for autonomous shipping. Devices that communicate autonomously create mobile traffic with significantly different characteristics than today’s dominantly human-to- human traffic, and the coexistence of the different types of human-centric and machine data has significant challenges as the usage is very different, driving different capacity requirements. That has led to a focus on enhanced mobile broadband – also called extreme mobile broadband, ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). There are four main areas in Release 16: • Enhancing key capabilities such as spectrum efficiency, network energy efficiency and mobility • Supporting the mMTC scenario through new protocols such as reshaped orthogonal frequency division multiplexing • New features such as using New Radio base stations to provide positioning information on the terminals and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) • Efficient network management through wireless ‘big data driven’ intelligent radio access network architectures. For autonomous systems the URLLC is key. It includes using a wake-up signal to provide power-saving and a peak cancelled multi-carrier waveform to try to promote network energy efficiency. Multi-user multiple-input multiple- output (MU-MIMO) has been adopted as a key enabling technique to achieve the capacity demand in 4G wireless networks. However, there are still some problems in the frequency division duplex (FDD) MU-MIMO system, such as channel quality indicator mismatch and low probability of multi-user comms. New techniques are using an MU-MIMO scheme in FDD assisted by device- to-device techniques to enhance the conventional 4G LTE network and boost the performance of 5G systems. mMTC services are also expected to play an essential role in 5G. Currently, the cellular systems have been designed and optimised mainly to serve traffic from human-to- human comms, which are generally characterised by bursts of data during active periods with a higher demand on downlink. However, major MTC services have very different traffic characteristics – usually small and infrequent data generated from a mass of MTC devices imposing a higher traffic volume on the uplink. The main challenge in mMTC is therefore to support scalable and efficient connectivity for a massive number of devices sending very short packets. Connection density then becomes one of the most important and challenging key performance indicators, so multiple technologies end up being used together, including random access, NOMA and waveform. On the other hand, the peak-to- average power ratio (PAPR) is also a major optimisation goal for mMTC services since lower PAPR leads to long battery life, high power amplification efficiency, wide coverage and possible cost reduction. That makes the waveform with low PAPR suitable for mMTC services. What is in the 5G standard? The key differences between the 5G (IMT- 2020) and 4G (IMT-Advanced) technology standards (Courtesy of 3GPP)