by Thomas Zemen (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology) and Toon Norp (TNO)
5G standardisation and first system trials have generated significant interest in the new system capabilities and use cases of 5G. 5G aims to increase the peak data rate to 10Gbit/s, and focuses strongly on business applications where a latency (transmission delay from transmitter (TX) to receiver (RX)) of 1 ms and a battery lifetime of up to 10 years are key performance parameters. Clearly, a 5G system will not provide all the performance targets simultaneously for a single communication link. In fact, 5G provides a combination of three different use case categories, within one system. These three use cases are: (a) enhanced mobile broad band (eMBB) for data rates up to 10 Gbit/s, (b) massive machine type communication (mMTC) with low energy consumption for a battery life of 10 years, optimised for low data rates of 10 bit/s; and (c) ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) providing 1ms latency at low frame error rates of 10-5.