Connectivity Technology Blog

According to Siemens , Industrie 4.0, the smart factory, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – these are the future of industrial manufacturing. Designing production plants and intralogistics to be more flexible, autonomous, and efficient requires the right communication framework and comprehensive connectivity. The new 5G communication standard opens up important new prospects. We have covered quite a few tutorials on Industrial IoT, Industry 4.0 and Private Networks. If you do not have a background on these topics, please see the related posts at the end of this post before proceeding further. At the 5G-Industry Summit back in September, Sander Rotmensen, Director Industrial Wireless Communication, Siemens AG spoke about how Industrial 5G will enable the industry of tomorrow. The abstract states: Industrial 5G opens the door to comprehensive wireless networking of production, maintenance and logistics. High data rates, reliable high-performance broadband transmission and ultra-s

ETSI's Fixed 5th Generation Network group (F5G ISG) has just released its first specification, ETSI GS F5G 003 , entitled F5G Technology Landscape. In this specification, the ISG studies the technical requirements, existing standards and gaps for 10 different new use cases, for home, enterprises or industrial needs. The press release says:  ETSI GS F5G 003 use cases include PON (passive optical network) on-premises and passive optical LAN. In this case, a PON system could connect end devices (like HDTV, HD surveillance cameras and VR/AR helmets) and provide higher data rate, better coordination and controlled latency than current Ethernet and Wi-Fi mesh. The high quality private line use case focuses on optical transport networks (OTN) for governments, large companies, financial and medical institutions who need guaranteed bandwidth, low latency, five-nines availability, totally secured network, access to Cloud services and intelligent operation and maintenance of their connectivi

We have made couple of introductory tutorials on "Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)" and another one on "Introduction to Vehicle to Everything (V2X) and Cellular V2X (C-V2X)". These provide you with the basics needed to understand the technology. In addition, we have also collected "3GPP Technical Specifications (TS) and Reports (TR) related to V2X" here . 5G Americas has recently published a white paper titled, “Vehicular Connectivity: C-V2X and 5G,” which covers the impacts of 5G-based cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technologies on vehicles, embedded infrastructure, and intelligent transportation networks. You can download the PDF here and this page contains a presentation and a summary video. The paper also details how Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), previously known as mobile edge computing, can help bring processing power near the vehicle to meet ultra-low-latency requirements, and to reduce network traffic towards a centralized

We looked at the number of IoT devices on The 3G4G Blog post yesterday . As you may have already noticed, the number of unlicensed IoT devices are growing as well. The Helium network is a decentralized wireless network that enables devices anywhere in the world to wirelessly connect to the Internet and geolocate themselves without the need for power-hungry satellite location hardware or expensive cellular plans.  Helium uses an open-source LongFi architecture, which combines the LoRaWAN wireless protocol and the Helium blockchain. Hotspots also acts as miners on the Helium blockchain so owners can earn a new cryptocurrency (HNT), for building the network and transferring IoT device data. The Helium whitepaper says: Powering the Helium network is a blockchain with a native protocol token incentivizing a two sided marketplace between coverage providers and coverage consumers. With the introduction of a blockchain, we inject decentralization into an industry currently controlled by mono

We have covered tutorials on IoT, IIoT and even Industry 4.0 as part of 3G4G. Recently, Cambridge Wireless (CW), the well known international community for companies involved in the research, development and application of wireless and mobile, internet, semiconductor and software technologies relaunched their Industrial IoT SIG. As part of the relaunch, a refresher webinar was held to explain the concept of Industrial IoT. All the sessions as well as the Q&A session were fantastic. You can view the resources here once shared. For this blog post, we are looking at the final talk by Sylvia Lu, FRSA, Head of Technology Strategy, u-blox UK, Member of Advisory Board, UK5G. Let's start with some example use cases on the factory floor that you can see shown in the picture above. Some of the topics that are shown in the picture has been covered as part of other blog posts and are listed at the bottom of this post. This slide nicely summarizes not only the cellular and 5G standards but

NTT Technical Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Feb. 2021 provided a fantastic summary of Standardization of Next-generation Wireless LANs in the IEEE 802.11 Working Group. Here is an extract from the article : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 is a working group (WG) within the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee that helps develop standards related to local area networks (LANs) and metropolitan area networks (MANs). It is responsible for standardization of physical layer and medium access control (MAC) layer technologies of wireless LANs. There are several types of subgroups within the IEEE 802.11 WG. A task group (TG) is a subgroup responsible for developing a technical standard or recommended practice. A study group is a preparatory group to create a TG to discuss use cases, technologies, and feasibilities. As a result of discussion, a study group creates documents called Project Authorization Request and Criteria for Standards Development. There are also a grou

As we have already started talking about the post-5G world, we need to keep in mind that 5G still has a lot of enhancements and new features in pipeline. Many of these new features will require support of an enhanced backhaul, be it terrestrial or in the sky.  Earlier this year, GSMA released a report on backhaul, titled, "Wireless Backhaul Evolution: Delivering next-generation connectivity" that outlines the evolution of this important area. It has been written by ABI Research and details wireless backhaul for 5G era and the role played by new backhaul and existing bands, as well as technologies that improve spectrum efficiency. The summary of the report says: The transition to 5G will need a sizable backhaul evolution to accommodate growing traffic and new network capabilities. Despite the growing importance of fibre, wireless backhaul is set to play a central role in these developments. This means regulators have a vital role as their decisions moving forward will impactfu

GSMA together with some mobile network operators recently published a white paper to promote the use of High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) technology to meet the need for broadband connectivity worldwide. We have covered HAPS multiple times in our blog posts. They are unmanned aircrafts that fly typically at altitudes of around 20km.  The description of the paper says: Operating in the stratosphere, unmanned high-altitude platforms (HAPS) could bring connectivity to areas that are either not covered, or are only partially covered, by terrestrial cellular networks. This whitepaper highlights the potential of HAPS to meet the need for more broadband connectivity worldwide. HAPS are very versatile: they can be adjusted to prioritise coverage or capacity depending on the use case. Moreover, an aircraft can be deployed to cover a location at short notice. As HAPS can employ LTE and 5G, there are no special requirements on the user equipment: a normal smartphone can be used. As a result,

One of the challenges with 5G that many people must have noticed are the poor uplink speeds, especially on the cell edge. While using mid/high-band TDD, these poor uplink characteristics result is a smaller cell size as compared to that of low bands or even 3G/4G.  This is where Huawei's innovation comes in play. Huawei White Paper on Innovation and Intellectual Property details this as follows: With the growing adoption of 5G in B2B domains, networks need to offer faster uplink speeds and lower latency without compromising downlink speeds. Huawei has come up with a series of solutions to increase uplink coverage and bandwidth. Our two vital technologies – Uplink & Downlink Decoupling, and Super Uplink – have been accepted by 3GPP as part of the Release 15 and Release 16 specifications for global 5G networks, respectively. Uplink & Downlink Decoupling: Adds low frequency bands for uplink transmission in areas that lack uplink coverage in 3.5 GHz bands. Uses high frequency