5G Wireless Evolution White Paper: Towards a Sustainable 5G (2021) February 2021Copyright Reserved The present document (i.e. 5G Wireless Evolution White Paper: Towards a Sustainable 5G) is protected by copyright, trademark, and other proprietary laws. The co-sourcing companies take claims of copyright infringement seriously and reserve the right to claim against alleged copyright infringements that comply with applicable law. Co-authors: HAO Yue (CMCC), GUO Xuanyu (CMCC), XU Xiaodong (CMCC), ZHAO Yang (HUAWEI), Christian Hoymann (ERICSSON), CHEN Bo (QUALCOMM), QIU Hong(QUALCOMM), Chungwoo Hwang (KT), Satoshi Nagata (NTT DOCOMO), SHE Xiaoming (CTC), HAN Xiao (CURI), LI Shuang (CBN), Hiroki TAKEDA (KDDI), Soonki Jo (SKT), Jaehyun Chang (LG UPLUS), HU Yang (NOKIA), LEI Min (MEDIATEK), YUAN Zhigui (ZTE), Tan Cheng Peng (MAXIS) Co-sourcing Companies: CMCC, HUAWEI, ERICSSON, QUALCOMM, KT, NTT DOCOMO, CTC, CURI, CBN, KDDI, SKT, LG UPLUS, NOKIA, MEDIATEK, ZTE, MAXISCONTENTS 1. Introduction 1 2. Driving Force of 5G Evolution 2 3. Requirement and Objective of 5G Wireless Evolution 4 4. Key Technologies of 5G Wireless Evolution 6 4.1 SmartandEff ect iveSystem 6 4.1.1 AI 6 4.1.2 QoE Management 7 4.1.3 Energy Saving 8 4.1.4 Coverage Enhancement 8 4.1.5 MR-DC Enhancement 9 4.2 EnhancementofExist ingCapabilit ies 9 4.2.1 Uplink Centric Evolution 9 4.2.2 Massive MIMO Evolution 10 4.2.3 URLLC Enhancement 10 4.2.4 Massive IoT Enhancement 11 4.2.5 Mobility Enhancement 11 4.3 MaximizeSpectrumV alue 12 4.3.1 Flexible Duplex 12 4.3.2 Higher Frequency 12 4.3.3 Flexible Spectrum Access 13 4.3.4 Dynamic Spectrum Sharing 14 4.4 NewApplicat ionEnabler 14 4.4.1 Positioning and Sensing Evolution 14 4.4.2 NR Integration of NTN and TN 15 4.4.3 New Broadcasting Evolution 16 4.4.4 High-interactive Broadband Communication 17 4.4.5 User-centric Multiple Devices Coordination 17 4.4.6 Network Slicing 18 5. Summary 185G Wireless Evolution White Paper Towards a Sustainable 5G 1 1. Introduction 5G is being globally deployed and commercially lunched. With the worlds leading mobile network operators accelerating their commercial rollout of 5G networks, it is expected that more than 6.5 million 5G base stations will be deployed to bring 5G services to 58% of the worlds population, and the number of global 5G connections will exceed 100 billion beyond 2025. 5G is not only deeply rooted in the traditional consumer electronics industry, but also receives extensive attention in the manufacturing industry. Operators are increasingly endeavoring to bring the expertise of managing a high quality air-interface, network operation, optimization, and service interoperability to connect people, homes, industrial equipment, and so on. In anticipation of significant 5G penetration and the 5G traffic volume by 2025, continuously improving 5G networks is inevitable. Especially, 5G evolution envisions commercializing todays attractive use cases, as well as bringing new value to all stakeholders through strong technological improvement and maturity. At the same time, backward compatibility needs to be ensured to protect the industrys investments, and to have the 5G eco-system be healthy and sustainable. A well-defined 5G evolution framework with common industry understanding will help to achieve these goals. Such a framework will encompass the targeted commercial use cases beyond 2025, the requirements of 5G evolution, and its key technology directions. It is noted that in 2020 NGMN released NGMN white paper 2.0, which welcomes research starting on the future evolution of wireless systems and accordingly suggests that future wireless systems help address the societal and environmental requirements, challenges and opportunities. In light of this recommendation, further 5G wireless evolution becomes increasingly important for all industrial partners, aiming to expand 5G use cases, to bring new values to the industry. Typically, three years are needed to develop the necessary standards and to build the eco-system. Now it is natural to initiate 5G wireless evolution technology study and industry incubation targeting commercialization around 2025. It could be a good start to publish a joint 5G technology white paper on wireless evolution to call for further study and help to reach consensus on key components of the evolution. Towards a sustainable 5G, this white paper outlines the key ingredients of 5G wireless technology to be further consolidated by all relevant industry sections and players5G Wireless Evolution White Paper Towards a Sustainable 5G 2 2. Driving Force of 5G Evolution 5G has been rolling out globally since 2019. Global operators traffic of video, voice and data services continue to grow quickly. Consumers have been increasing expectations of their device resolution, quality, as well as other emerging data intensive applications. 5G also helps the economic shift from building networks to exploitation of multi-purpose infrastructure. The current 5G technology has provided broadband services widely. As society advances, more and more enterprises require advanced digitalized technology to deliver their new services and business opportunities, e.g. smart cities, remote medical treatment, AR/VR, etc. Industries are growing fast in various areas, including intelligent factories, smart agriculture, intelligent transportation and more. 5G evolution is aiming at providing enhanced capabilities and new technologies to adapt to, and enable, the way that citizens live, work, and play. COVID-19 also changes peoples lives. Providing resilience in the face of crises and emergencies, including health monitoring for unpredictable situations, a post-COVID economic recovery, and sustaining and re-establishing social connections can all be strengthened by 5G evolution. As such, 5G evolution needs to continue leveraging the capabilities and new technologies, and to more deeply integrate them into peoples daily lives. The progress is just beginning, and there is no doubt that ongoing evolution will have more challenges. Therefore it is critical at this point of time when 5G networks have just been deployed for one more year. We should start to look at future technology trends for more than 5 years from now, plan our strategy for future network evolution, and keep in mind the key drivers for our business development. Future networks will be a fundamental component for virtually all parts of life, society, and industries, fulfilling the communication needs of humans as well as intelligent machines. 5G ev olut ion is desir ed to achieve higher ef ficienc y b y en abling tailor able c omplexit y , c ontr ollable po w er consumpt ion and manageable cost while impr oving the capabilit iesandfunct ionalit ies. With five years commercial development foreseen, 5G evolution needs more capacities and functionalities to meet new requirements from eMBB and vertical traffic. But in the early stage of 5G development operators have inevitably confronted various challenges of network deployment and operations. This is always accompanied by increasing complexity, power consumption and cost from various technical and business issues. For example: operators are facing different coexistence of 4G and 5G in their 5G deployment, e.g. multiple frequency bands with different RATs. It is quite realistic for us to consider how to avoid more power consumption and maximize the efficiency, as well as reduce the complexity of network optimization and configuration for different services, network O&M and balancing business operation for eMBB and verticals. It should be no doubt that higher efficiency is regarded as the first driving force factor of 5G evolution. Driving force 15G Wireless Evolution White Paper Towards a Sustainable 5G 3 5G ev olut ion is needed to sat isf y higher - definit ion and higher -inter act ivity customer entertainments, which will be populated rapidly. There is a strong increase in highly-interactive applications, where very low latencies and very high data rates are required to enable applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. These applications serve high-definition multimedia and high user density by the cellular network, which are increased in many indoor and outdoor open areas, such as stadia, large events for entertainment, sport and so on. Video quality is changing for the better from 4K 30 fps to 16K 120 fps, further enhancing the immersive experience. These growing resolution and frame rates demand much higher data rates, lower latencies, and higher capacity. Therefore, 5G evolution to support enhancement services including NR multicast/broadcast, highly-interactive broadband communication, etc. is needed. Furthermore, it can be deduced that 5G evolution is needed to fundamentally change peoples daily life, including remote medical, autonomous driving, etc. With the great expansion of the scope of human activities, the future communication network requires not only larger bandwidth and higher speed, but also considers the communication in specialist areas, such as land, sea and air scenes, to provide a ubiquitous and “always on line” user experience. Driving force 2 5G ev olut ion is needed to integr ate itself into v arious industrialapplicat ions. New use cases for industry will continue to be greatly developed by 2025 and beyond. Various services of different requirements need to support the different industrial areas such as motor control, mobile control, motorized robots, resulting in the need for a high adaptability and scalability of the system. Based on the current development of the vertical traffics, it is predicted that: 1) Industrial sensors will be widely used with zero cost and zero energy in factories, health centers, farms etc. Wide use of sensors can also help environmental protection, e.g. IoT applications for monitoring the status of forests, farms, oceans, and tracking goods in the supply chain. 2) Some services of industrial-grade quality have stringent requirements in terms of end-to-end latency, communication service availability，and jitter. Most of machines are information providers instead of information consumers with special industrial characteristics, which create a huge amount of uplink traffic, raising further challenges to 5G uplink bandwidth. For example, machine vision will upload the massive data to 5G network. 3) In addition, indoor positioning has become a common requirement. For example, electronic fences for personnel security management, and asset management and tracking, require positioning precision at centimeter level. A wide range of IoT devices have no power supply and the positioning tags attached to them should have long battery life. This means that low power consumption is another key requirement for positioning. All the above use cases demand 5G evolution to integrate itself into various industrial applications. Driving force 35G Wireless Evolution White Paper Towards a Sustainable 5G 4 3. Requirements and Objectives of 5G Wireless Evolution As illustrated above, 5G evolution is needed for peoples daily life, for better inter-connecting various industry applications and for accommodating new technologies like AI. This section elaborates on the key requirements and objectives expected to support the multiple driving forces of 5G wireless evolution. 5G evolut ion is needed to accommodate new technology suchasAI. To resolve the requirement of vertical applications, operators need to consider integrating 5G and new technologies, such as AI, IoT etc. Among these new technologies we are monitoring, the most important factor to consider is AIs infrastructure and development. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be integrated into almost everything learning, adapting, and intelligently automating as we move towards intelligent society and industry. The real value of AI, however, is not limited to applications which connect to the network, but also ultimately be realized in the networks themselves, being instrumental in the evolution of the network and an enabler of autonomous network management. Collaborative industrial AI partners could perform many challenging tasks involving manual labor more safely and efficiently, as well as acting autonomously and adaptively. Machine vision is already widely used today in product quality inspection and safety inspection. The integration of AI into networks promises to turn complexity into efficiency. In summary, AI is a new trend to build a smart 5G network for efficient operation and sustainable development. Driving force 4 5G wir eless ev olut ion needs to enable a flexible, adaptive, and intelligent wireless system and keep cost-eff ect ive. 5G system is designed with full functionalities to accommodate various deployment scenarios and use cases, e.g. eMBB, mMTC and URLLC, while in different cases, different batch of features are needed. 5G wireless system should be flexible and adoptable that functions could be implemented or reduced, activated or de-activated flexibly in an on-demand manner according to the various deployment scenarios or use cases to keep solution cost-effective. Besides, OPEX should be considered in order to reduce the total cost of 5G. Therefore, technology to help energy saving is required5G Wireless Evolution White Paper Towards a Sustainable 5G 5 5G wireless evolution shall truly support use cases r equiring high data r ate and low latency simultaneously. For those applications changing daily life, AR, VR, remote medical etc., the performance requirements become more and more stringent. For instance, the VR applications with high resolution and high frame rate call for higher capabilities, e.g. the downlink rate could be increased from 50100 Mbit/ s up to 0.51 Gbit/s and the latency could be lowered from 100 ms to 510 ms. At the same time, the network capability needs also to be increased, to support the large number of 5G users simultaneously enjoying the experience of such applications. In addition, the service performance guarantee is also crucial, for example, supporting both high reliability and 0 ms interruption mobility performance. All these features lay a good network foundation for the popularization of these applications. 5G wir eless ev olut ion shall pr o vide uplink c entric enhancement f or its wide adopt ion in various vert ical applicat ions. Both interactive XR applications and industry applications will benefit from continuous enhancement in the uplink. Especially for verticals, such as machine vision, data collection, highly-interactive HD video transmission services, and video- assisted remote operation, the traffic will be uplink centric, creating a huge amount of uplink traffic. For instance, in an HD video surveillance application, uplink data rate per 1 HD camera with 2K video streaming could be about 7 Mbit/s. Moreover, this kind of service may be 24-hours online and tens of HD cameras may be deployed in one cell.