ITU-R defined a series of requirements for 5G in the IMT 2020 vision and the 3GPP standards body has been defining the detailed standards to meet ITU requirements.
- eMBB – Enhanced Mobile Broadband: This category supports ultra-highspeed connection indoors and outdoors, with uniform quality of service, even at the cell edge. These services should also support high user mobility on highways, trains and aircraft. The technology allows for more dynamic and adaptive delivery of real-time capacity and effortlessly supports new services like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Outdoor data rates up to 2 Gbps and indoor of up to 20 Gbps are envisaged.
- mMTC – Massive Machine Type Communications: This supports a very large number of connected devices usually called Internet of Things (IoT), with varying quality of service requirements. The objective of this category is to provide very high density of connectivity where a single Base Station can support 10,000 or more devices providing an aggregate connectivity for more than a million devices per square kilometre at the network level. This category offers many applications like smart cities, smart power grids, smart-farms to mention a few.
- uRLLC – Ultra-reliable and Low Latency Communications: This category has stringent requirements such as latency of less than one milli-second and low packet-loss rates of better than one in 10,000 packets. This technology opens a brand new dimension to the application of wireless networks such as tactile Internet, emergency response, collaborative robotics, intelligent transportation, eHealth, drones, and public safety etc.
For 5G to deliver on its promise, it will also need enabling technologies for deploying networks efficiently and flexibly. Some of them are IoT devices, Millimetric Band, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Network Slicing (NS), MIMO, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Distributed or Edge Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence / Advanced Analytics.