5G Update Series: Mission Critical Applications for 5G

5G critical communications is one of the most sought after features of upcoming 5G networks. There are many industries, such as industrial robotics/factory automation, autonomous vehicles, traffic, public safety, fire, operations, emergency medical services, and even military/defense that all may benefit from enabling features and technology capabilities offered by mission critical 5G functions. One of the main 5G feature areas of interest to these applications is ultra-high reliability and low latency (URLLC) communication features. With 5G, the acknowledgement mechanism used to recover from lost data, reduced infrastructure latency, and other enhancement are proposed to dramatically reduce the round-trip latency and improve reliability in 3GPP Release 16/17.

As the current 3GPP release, release 15, focuses on enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), 5G URLLC and critical communications applications are still pending standards and technology development. However, proposed changes to 5G mobile networks and standards is already garnering interest from many applications, as the 5G New Radio (NR) architecture is planned to enable a wide variety of use cases that are otherwise underserved by previous cellular technology generations. For instance, a concept has been proposed for 5G that would allow for logical partitioning of traffic into dedicated streams with deterministic transmission characteristics. A process known as network slicing, can allow for a single radio interface to support both consumer and enterprise traffic, which could also be used to facilitate a pipe that is either dedicated, or better suited to critical communications compared to the single-pipe consumer-driven architecture of previous generations.

However, mission critical 5G and the infrastructure necessary to make it success may still be years away following standardization (IHS predicts these standards won’t be finalized until 2022). Currently, there are mission critical LTE technologies that still provide a reliable communications platform for public safety, emergency response, and other industries. These standards have pioneered LTE-based mission critical push-to-talk voice communication services. These services are currently operational in several countries and provide much-needed enhancements over consumer-grade LTE communication services.

Where many generations of cellular technology required entirely new hardware, for both the infrastructure and user equipment (UE), it is likely the 5G standards will be designed in such a way to be back-compatible with the later 4G LTE deployments. Some 4G LTE deployments are even being designed with configurability in mind to allow for “future-proofing” while 5G features are defined, developed, and deployed over the next few years. It is also likely that LTE will continually be progressed in the upcoming 3GPP standards to eventually merge into 5G, as opposed to a complete technology swap resulting in mass obsolescence.

There are also other non-public network (NPN) technologies that exist, and have been deployed by governments and private companies. These NPNs may be 3GPP-based with modifications that provide enhanced customer features beyond what Wi-Fi, CDMA450, LMR/P25/TETRA, Ethernet, fiber, Bluetooth or other available wired/wireless standards offer. Hence, there are several current solutions for mission-critical applications that may eventually merge or diversify as 5G standards for URLLC and critical communications are realized and solutions become available.