By Patrick McLaughlin
The forthcoming 5G, the fifth generation of wireless technology for cellular networks, is being heralded as a boon to everything from enabling medical procedures to be conducted remotely, to providing business opportunities to producers and installers of fiber-optic cabling systems. So far 5G’s promise remains just that—a promise—as widescale buildout and deployment have not yet materialized. Nonetheless, when 5G eventually does live up to its hype as an enabling technology for all kinds of technology platforms, it will do so because it will provide extremely low-latency connections.
5G, and the cellular protocols preceding it, are produced by 3GPP—the Third Generation Partnership Project. 3GPP “unites seven telecommunications standard development organizations, known as organization partners, and provides their members with a stable environment to produce the reports and specifications that define 3GPP technologies,” 3GPP explains about itself. “The project covers cellular communications technologies, including radio access, core network and service capabilities, which provide a complete system description for mobile telecommunications.”
3GPP Release 15 included Phase 1 of the 5G system. Release 16 is under development and is on schedule to be completed in 2020. In October 2019, 3GPP discussed the status of Release 16, when the organization explained, “Work has started on around 25 Release 16 studies, on a variety of topics [including] multimedia priority service, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) application layer services, 5G satellite access, local area network support in 5G, wireless and wireline convergence for 5G, terminal positioning and location, communications in vertical domains and network automation and novel radio techniques. Further items being studied include security, codecs and streaming services, local area network internetworking, network slicing and the IoT.”
Low latency defined
As it is used in the context of 5G, the term “low latency” is not just an arbitrary expression, left to be defined by any organization claiming to offer fast connections. 3GPP has established definitions and requirements of Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC).
In a technical paper titled “The Role of 5G URLLC for the Future of Mobile Service Providers”—a paper that was written for Intel—ABI Research director Dmitris Mavrakis explains, “URLLC and Release 16 are the first cases in which the 3GPP standard does not focus on connectivity alone, but in broader end-to-end system aspects that become platforms for applications developed in the broader enterprise ecosystems. Previous releases, including Release 15, focused on optimizing the delivery of data through the wireless channel for mobile broadband capacity, with an appropriate amount of delay/reliability tolerance based on predominant traffic types. URLLC also optimizes the delivery of data, but based on different traffic requirements that include latency and reliability. Release 16 will focus on the ecosystem, end-to-end network orchestration, and may also make mobile operators focus on more key network parameters, rather than capacity and top speeds only.”
Mavrakis continues, “URLLC is also necessary to enable mobile service providers to evolve beyond connectivity and claim a place in the enterprise digitization that is currently progressing across many verticals. Webscale giants including Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Tencent, are targeting the same verticals that mobile service providers want to address, but without a vital component: the last mile of connectivity to consumers or enterprises that mobile service providers have with 4G and 5G. If mobile service providers do take advantage of a 5G radio network, URLLC, edge computing, and network automation/orchestration, there is a significant opportunity to become much more than connectivity providers. However, this transition will not be an easy task, and it will take a lot more than what mobile service providers currently provide, which is largely driven by connectivity alone.”
Architecture’s role
According to David Dukinfield, a customer-experience product manager in Cisco’s service provider practice, “URLLC is a set of features that provide low latency and ultra-high reliability for faster cloud access and mission-critical and time-sensitive applications. Low latency and reliability of URLLC makes applications such as remote healthcare, semiconductor robotics, and autonomous transportation—not only our self-driving cars, but think self-driving trucks and delivery services—systems feasible. It’s also why people are looking at 5G for mission-critical applications like remote surgery where the response time to control signaling must be the shortest it can be and dropped packets are virtually non-existent.”
Dukinfield explains the role of system design in achieving URLLC: “To reduce network latency, webscale companies can take advantage of multi-access edge computing [MEC] functionality in the 5G architecture. In the past, user traffic was sent to a few, often distant central data centers. But with MEC, user traffic is no longer tunneled to a provider’s data center. Instead, that tunnel is terminated at local smaller data centers nearer the cell radio. This approach can eliminate network delays of approximately 100 milliseconds from end-to-end latency because the traffic isn’t traversing back to the central data center.
“For webscale companies,” Dukinfield continues, “ultra-low radio and network latencies with ultra-reliable traffic opens up new opportunities. They can consider dedicated radio bearers to cloud services using MECs for local traffic offload. In this case, you could create a dedicated bearer (analogous to the dedicated bearer for Voice over LTE) to any cloud-based service, located near or often collocated in the MEC. The service could be caching of on-demand video, to real-time financials, to any cloud-based service you could create. With this solution, you’d have control over the end-to-end network characteristics—bandwidth, latency, jitter—you will need to provide the customer experience they require for your new application.
“Initially this end-to-end path or ‘slice’ through the network would be statically assigned to the application. In the near future, applications will be able to request their path in real time based on their requirements. Thanks to URLLC, webscale companies now can set up the network services they need to match the application services they want to offer.”
Verizon in action
Amid the victory laps that Verizon has taken about the municipalities and sports venues it has equipped with 5G connectivity, the company also has taken time to address technical issues related to 5G, including latency. A recent entry to its Personal Tech library of information asked, and answered, what is the latency of 5G? In that post, the company explained, “The benefits of 5G are clear when taking into account the speed, bandwidth, and latency of Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network. 5G will open up a world of opportunities for the growth of technology, in part because of the low latency of the network.
“Network latency is the time required for a set of data to travel between two points. 5G technology is different from previous generations of cellular technology because of how short that amount of time will be. A network with high latency can be inefficient for some users. Gamers may be familiar with high network latency that results in lag, which looks like an obvious delay between the action of the players and the actual responses within the game.
“Network latency is caused by a variety of factors, including the speed of the network as well as the available bandwidth and the size of the transmitted data. Generally speaking, the latency of 5G is faster than the blink of an eye. Gigabits-per-second throughputs and single-millisecond latencies are set to become the new normal. 5G will enable users to send and download huge amounts of data in near real time. Low latency is one of the necessary conditions for the fulfillment of massive IoT, which is expected to help heavy industry and big data enterprises to expand, innovate and globally scale their operations.”
Verizon reported that early users of its 5G network in Chicago and Minneapolis experienced peak speeds that approached 1 Gbit/sec and latency of less than 30 milliseconds, which it points out is 23 milliseconds faster than 4G metrics.
Verizon has put its real money where its proverbial mouth is. In 2019 the company held the “Built on 5G Challenge,” which was a search for companies to create products, services, and applications that will capitalize on 5G capabilities. When announcing the contest in early 2019, Verizon said, “Applicants will need to show how their ideas use technology to impact positive change, not only in how their solutions create new utility, but also in how their businesses are run.”
In October Verizon narrowed the field of entrants down to 10 finalists, and in January it announced that Ario took first place and the $1-million prize that went along with it. Ario has developed an augmented reality productivity platform to increase workplace safety and efficiency, Verizon explained when making the announcement. “Ario will use Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband to improve the platform’s performance with advanced connectivity and improved image recognition.”
Verizon awarded $500,000 to second-place finisher GAROU, whose virtual reality content platform leverages a 3D model of the world as an interface for accessing content and for in-VR social interaction. GAROU will use Verizon 5G to improve VR technology in a multi-user setting and help users access content in real time.
And third-place finisher LexSet received $250,000. LexSet generates synthetic image data from 3D content to train high-performance computer vision artificial intelligence. It will use Verizon 5G to enable advances in edge-based mixed reality, robotics, and inventory management.
“These innovators have come up with some really groundbreaking solutions that can only be fully realized with the fast speeds, massive bandwidth and super-low latency that Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband offers,” said Nicki Palmer, chief product development officer at Verizon. “By bringing these companies into our 5G Labs, where we collaborate with universities, startups and enterprises to co-create 5G concepts, we’re giving them access to all the tools they need to create truly transformational experiences that will reshape entire industries.”
These challenge winners will have eight weeks of access to Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband at Verizon’s 5G Labs, and they will partner with Verizon 5G specialists to develop their concepts.
The other seven finalists in the challenge program were post-production studio DigitalFilm Tree; software-as-a-service provider for robotics InOrbit; Soul Machines, a human experience platform that allows automation and personalization of digital interfaces and interactions; Loro, which produces a device that allows people with limited mobility to connect with the world; 3D and AR developer SVRF; livestreaming technology developer Mobcrush; and Reniac, which provides technology that reduces latency and increases throughput in data-centric applications.
ABI Research’s Mavrakis stresses that 5G and URLLC in particular might cause upheaval to some traditional business practices. “Traditional vendors will need to become platform developers, rather than proprietary hardware or software providers ... similar to other web giants, such as Amazon, which transformed itself from an online book retailer to a cloud computing giant, mostly through its determination to create platforms that were initially used internally and eventually sold externally. Carrier-grade, common computing platforms will likely be the foundational components of these new networks, and existing technology suppliers or even new companies will tie it all together.”
Patrick McLaughlin is our chief editor.