5G- An Introduction to All About NR U-Plane

3.3 gpp NR USER Plane introduction from Saurabh Verma

Ericsson - From Healthcare to Homecare- A 5G enablement.

Source: ETTelecom

"Key findings include the decentralisation of healthcare moving from hospitals towards homes. Also, patient data is becoming more centralised, thus turning hospitals into data centers. Increasing dependence on wearables and remote treatments makes 5G essential to provide reliable and secure services."

Next-generation networks will be pivotal in healthcare transformation, providing transmission efficiency in an ecosystem of feedback and alerts, mobility and low latency, according to Ericsson's latest consumer lab report.

The report titled 'From Healthcare to Homecare' reveals consumer insights on the impact of 5G on the future of healthcare and its transformation across preventative, routine and post-operative care.

The networks will become a vehicle for a range of applications, including remote monitoring through medical-grade wearables, virtual doctor-patient interaction, and remotely operated robotic surgery.

Key findings include the decentralisation of healthcare moving from hospitals towards homes. Also, patient data is becoming more centralised, thus turning hospitals into data centers. Increasing dependence on wearables and remote treatments makes 5G essential to provide reliable and secure services.

Evolving consumer expectations, anytime patient data access, and increased internet use are also making way for non-traditional players to disrupt the healthcare industry.

This report covers insights from an online survey of 4,500 advanced smartphone broadband users in Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States, in addition to an online survey of 900 decision makers across six industries in these countries - healthcare, insurance, medical technology companies, telecom operators, app developers/aggregators and government regulatory bodies. (ANI)

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NGMN : 5G E2E Architecture framework; more on 'large scale convergence' at data plane.

The 5G system will also support flexible RAN structures including implementations based on Cloud principles and the placement of context awareness at the RAN edges (i.e. mobile edge computing). Both centralized and distributed implementation of RAN functions should be enabled to facilitate the realization of various RAN implementations. In addition, support for various coverage layers and cell sizes spanning extreme long-distance covering macro cells to small cell radio access deployments is required.

An open Perspective for LARGE SCALE CONVERGENCE, specially in case of data plane.

RAN Decomposition, Functional decomposition of the radio network is required to meet the diverse information transport demands (high performance to low performance) and align them with the demands of next-generation service categories of eMBB, mIoT, and URLLC. To accommodate these, a decomposition of the radio network protocol layer functions, across layer-1, layer-2, and layer-3 is required, in terms of the degree of centralisation or distribution.

This decomposition consists of placing more functions of the upper layers of the radio network protocol stack in distributed entities for high performance transport demands (e.g. high bandwidth, high-capacity, low-latency, low jitter etc.,) relative to a centralized entity. Scheduling optimisation at a centralized entity, for high performance transport across multiple distributed entities (e.g. base stations, remote radio heads etc.) for fast coordination is critical requirement.

For relatively low performance transport, more of the upper layer of the radio network protocol stack is placed at a centralized entity to optimize the cost/performance trade-off, associated with the distributed entities. This choice of functional split will determine the x-haul capacity requirement and associated latency specifications and performance. This will impact the network architecture as it could determine the placement of nodes and distance between them or, in the case of a higher layer split, will be tolerant of a large latency from a RAN perspective which may be excessive when low-latency services are considered, therefore bounds must be applied within the network architecture to enable a service provider to support low latency services.

A distributed RAN (D-RAN) with several functional splits will be supported by 5G. Figure 1 illustrates the configuration with co-located centralised unit (CU) and distributed (DU). All radio protocol layers are terminated within the cell site.

The connection from the cell site towards the core network is traditional mobile backhaul which will be scaled and optimised to support 5G data rates and performance targets such as low-latency, low PELR, low and very deterministic PDV etc. The D-RAN configuration does not constrain the ability of the local CU to support remote DU; in fact the cell site could become a CU for other cells sub-tended as illustrated in Figure 2.

A 5G C-RAN can be implemented with a higher layer split with the protocols stack with PDCP being located in the CU while the remainder of the stack is in the DU, as shown in Figure 3. This is one example; other splits will result in a different distribution of functionality between CU and DU.

This configuration has similar x-haul capacity requirements when compared with traditional backhaul, the latency and performance requirements of the RAN are not stringent and therefore consideration must be given to engineer the x-haul link in accordance with service-based latency and performance targets.

170511 ngmn e2_e_archframework_v0.6.5 from Saurabh Verma

WiFi & LTE convergence at network level using 3GPP LIMONET standards

5G-Application defined networking- a magical paradigm

How much latency is enough to support the most stringent real time application? What is the least interruption time to maintain the service integrity for most consistent application during transfer of end user from one point of connect to other point of connect, to access the serving network, or during the fault recovery from transient faults with in the network itself.

These could be some of the citation for the requirements for the highly available network. So what I was taking here as magical networks… and that is what I want to discuss as magical networks paradigm i.e. networks which are so highly available that the application is completely transparent of their internal behaviour for environmental changes like, mobility, fault & recovery.

We know that even currently available networks provide very high availability and the consistency of the service is maintained during hand off, connection failure & recovery, reselection of access points etc. There are quite a procedural executions to maintain such availability with fair transparency to the application.

The magical networks paradigm is to make such lengthy procedural execution to almost disappear or reduce them to the negligibility of computation.

And this is very much feasible if your latency of access is coming down and down and also with some of architectural evolution. The core of the network, where the context of the application requirement for the delivery of services is retained, is dissolving to totally flat architecture with all IP paradigm. There is no rigid or strict architectural requirements in terms of core network architecture as the NFV and cloud is blurring the boundaries of computational requirement of network specific functionalities.

That means networks are such that the end users are able to access service with minimum set up time due to less procedural computation and very low latency. The mobility is such that the procedural executions are negligible to provide the hands off but rather like a fresh connection from one point of connect to other point of connect so fast and consistent that the magic has occurred below the line completely transparent for the things above the line.

This magical paradigm could be aligned with Application defined networking which is about a complete separation of control and data plane and control plane is more defined from application plane. This also see the network access and core completely decoupled. This is rather the arrangement which can give a realization of the magical fidelity to applications.

5G is coming out with certain high expectation like very low latency perhaps of one millisecond only with radio advancement in radio access technology, convergence at access, network function virtualization at radio access network and for core network functions, Network slicing for effective network utilization and off-course software defined networking.

These are some of the advancement to felicitate a flat architecture so flat that only a ‘connect’ is required to change the point of access i.e. no hand offs or handovers. Also so highly available with fault detection and recovery like a 100 percent resilient.

Probably this will be the next optimization objectives for 5G initiatives.