In today’s blogpost we will discuss how the interworking architecture of the new 5G system with the existing LTE systems looks like. Inter-working between 4G and 5G will play a very important role in the early deployment of 5G system, which will rely on LTE to be the anchor or underlying system. In the standalone (SA) deployment of 5G, good inter-working with the LTE system to facilitate inter-RAT mobility between the two RATs will be required.

This post provides introduction to Smart Cities including: definition, drivers for smart cities, use cases, components of smart cities, challenges, and Telecommunications Service Providers (TSPs) Value Propositions for smart cities.

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a secure, reliable, and efficient type of Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) Technology that was standardized by 3GPP in Release 13 (LTE Advanced Pro) and uses licensed spectrum.

2017 was a very exciting year with a lot of new technological trends emerging such as 5G, IoT, MTC, SDN, etc. We tried to cover a vast variety of topics in our blog posts and also introduced the Grandmetric Guidepaper to get deeper understanding of the technological concepts.

This book guides you through the LTE, LTE-Advanced Pro and 5G from the perspective of practical aspects of air interface, RAN, Core Network and end-to-end data transfer. The practical approach is reflected by the angle of system design, link budget process, network planning, parameter configurations and optimizations together with the required tradeoffs. We also evaluate the different features’ impact on the overall system as it evolves from LTE to LTE-Advanced and then going further to LTE-Advanced Pro and 5G.

In this blogpost, we will discuss the most popular LPWAN technologies which are present in the current market that enable “Connectivity” for these IoT devices.

With this blogpost, we continue our discussion on the latest Study Items (SI) which are being worked on in 3GPP Rel-15[1,2]. We posted a similar article in April 2017 on our blog 3GPP Release-15: Further LTE Enhancements and 5G Normative Work Kick-off (do check it out if you haven’t already), and this post will add to the Work Items already discussed in the previous one and will present the latest studies on the LTE enhancements and 5G.

This blogpost is an introduction to the next steps of the 5G research under the umbrella of Horizon-2020 EU-funded projects. This is the third part of our “research activities in Europe“ blogpost series, a continuation of Towards 5G – research activities in Europe (part 1 – FP7 projects) and Towards 5G – research activities in Europe (part 2 – H2020 projects) . 5G-PPP […]

The 5G System (5GS) will have three main components as defined below: 5G Access Network (5G-AN) 5G Core Network (5GC) Use Equipment (UE) This blog is dedicated to describing the main components of the 5G Core Network as defined by the ongoing efforts at 3GPP SA [1]. The 5G system is being designed to support […]

LTE-Advanced Pro¹ has addressed the needs of the massive MTC use cases under the Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT)[1] feature². To address the IoT requirements in this segment, namely, support for: low throughput and sporadic transmission, limited mobility, large number of devices, low device cost, enhanced coverage – the PHY layer, protocol stack and signaling procedures have been […]