An Introduction to 5G

The New Radio, 5G Network and Beyond

Christopher Cox

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119602712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mobile & Wireless Communications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A comprehensive and approachable introduction to 5G

Written by a noted expert on the subject, An Introduction to 5G: The New Radio, 5G Network and Beyond offers an introductory system-level guide to 5G. The material covered includes:

• The use cases and requirements of the 5G system
• The architecture of the next generation radio access network and the 5G core
• The principles of radio transmission, millimetre waves and MIMO antennas
• The architecture and detailed design of the 5G new radio
• The implementation of HTTP/2 on the service-based interfaces of the 5G core
• The signalling procedures that govern the end-to-end-operation of the system
• The new features that are introduced in Releases 16 and 17

An Introduction to 5G is written for engineering professionals in mobile telecommunications, for those in non-technical roles such as management, marketing and intellectual property, and for students. It requires no more than a basic understanding of mobile communications, and includes detailed references to the underlying 3GPP specifications for 5G. The book's approach provides a comprehensive, end-to-end overview of the 5G standard, which enables readers to move on with confidence to the more specialized texts and to the specifications themselves.

1
Introduction

This book is about fifth‐generation (5G) mobile telecommunications. Our first chapter puts 5G into its historical context, and lays out its requirements and its most important technical features. We will begin by setting out the architecture of a mobile telecommunication system, and by reviewing the history of mobile telecommunications and the current state of the market. We will then discuss the likely applications for 5G, the resulting technical requirements and the underlying technologies that 5G uses. The chapter closes with a review of the standardization process and an introduction to the architecture of the 5G system.

1.1 Architecture of a Mobile Telecommunication System

1.1.1 High‐level Architecture

A mobile telecommunication system is run by a network operator such as Vodafone, AT&T or China Mobile, and is officially known as a public land mobile network (PLMN). As shown in Figure 1.1, it has four main components, namely the core network (CN), the radio access network (RAN), the management system and the user's device. The last of these is known colloquially as the mobile, and more formally as the user equipment (UE).

Figure 1.1 Architecture of a mobile telecommunication system.

The core network transports traffic between the mobile and one or more external networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or the internet. The core network also controls the mobile's communications with those external networks, and stores information about the network operator's subscribers.

The radio access network handles the network's radio communications with the mobile. It communicates with the core network over an interface known as the backhaul, and with the mobile over the air interface, also known as the radio interface. On that interface, the direction from network to mobile is known as the downlink (DL) or forward link, and the direction from mobile to network is the uplink (UL) or reverse link.

The network is controlled by a separate management system. Its tasks include configuring the various components of the core and radio access networks, monitoring their performance, reporting any faults to the network operator and billing the user.

A mobile can communicate outside the coverage area of its network operator by using the resources from two PLMNs, namely the visited network, where the mobile is located, and the operator's home network. That situation is known as roaming.

1.1.2 Internal Architecture of the Mobile

Internally, the mobile has two main components. The actual communication device is known as the mobile equipment (ME). In the case of a voice mobile or a smartphone, that is just a single device. However, the ME can itself have two parts, namely the mobile termination (MT), which handles all the communication functions, and the terminal equipment (TE), which terminates the data streams. The MT might be a plug‐in 5G card for a laptop, for example, in which case the TE would be the laptop itself.

The universal integrated circuit card (UICC) is a smart card, colloquially known as the SIM card. It runs an application known as the universal subscriber identity module (USIM), which stores user‐specific data such as the home network identity and carries out security‐related calculations using secure keys that the smart card stores.

1.1.3 Architecture of the Radio Access Network

The most important component of the radio access network is the base station. In a medium‐sized country like the United Kingdom, a typical network might contain several thousand of these. Figure 1.2 shows a group of nearby base stations, as viewed from above.

Figure 1.2 Example of base sta...