Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Starting from the next 5G standard version R18, 5G will officially enter the stage of 5G Advanced. In this context, while the industry continues to promote 5G standardization, it is also preparing for the commercial landing of 5G standards in the future, which will create new value for consumers and many vertical industries.

At the sixth China International Import Expo held not long ago, Qualcomm demonstrated the third generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform and the brand-new flagship mobile phones Xiaomi 14 and iQOO12 based on it, which received extensive attention. At the Wuzhen Summit of the 2023 World Internet Congress held at the same time, Qualcomm also won the "World Internet Congress leading Technology Award" by virtue of the Snapdragon X75 on the third generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform. Snapdragon X75 is the world's first 5G Advanced-ready modem and RF system, which can quickly support the new features of 5G Advanced and provide support for the continuous evolution of 5G standard and commercial landing.

5G is a continuously evolving technology. The completed 5G standards R15, R16 and R17 belong to the first stage of 5G development. In April 2021, the International Organization for Standardization (3GPP) officially designated the official name of the next stage of evolution of 5G as 5G Advanced, starting from R18, promoting the global 5G development to a new stage. One of the remarkable features of 5G Advanced is the ultra-fast downlink transmission rate, with a peak rate as high as 10Gbps, which is the "10 Gigabit ubiquitous experience" in the vision of 5G Advanced.

According to public information, in October this year, Qualcomm and Nokia Bell announced that they had jointly achieved peak downlink rates of more than 10 gigabits per second (10Gbps) by using test terminals equipped with Snapdragon X75 smartphones, as well as Nokia Bell AirScale commercial 5G millimeter wave base stations and core network system equipment. This test is completed by using 5G NR independent networking dual connection (NR-DC, that is, FR1+FR2 DC), using 5G millimeter wave band 4X200MHz carrier channel and Sub-6GHz band 100MHz bandwidth. Another previous test showed that Qualcomm Snapdragon X75 could achieve the downlink peak rate of 7.5Gbps in the Sub-6GHz band alone. All these are the fastest speed of 5G commercial chip in the corresponding frequency band, which makes people look forward to the commercial prospect of 5G Advanced standard in the future.

Qualcomm was one of the first companies to participate in the development of the 5G standard. The technical contributions made in the 5G standard development process helped to establish the key technical elements of 5G, including millimeter wave spectrum utilization, advanced channel coding, MIMO (multiple input and multiple output), etc. For example, in the 5G standard R17, the millimeter wave band is extended to a new frequency range from 52.6GHz to 71GHz, while Qualcomm provides 5G NR Extensible subcarrier spacing (SCS) scheme and slot-based flexible frame structure, so that this band extension can directly extend the subcarrier spacing of control and data channels to 480kHz and 960kHz, which contributes to the commercial acceleration of 5G millimeter wave band, resulting in larger network capacity and faster 5G speed.

Another vision of 5G Advanced is "hundreds of billions of smart connections", which includes a large number of low-cost Internet of things devices. In R17, Qualcomm promotes the development of 5G RedCap (also known as NR-Light) technology. 5G NR broadband design can be simplified to 5G NR-Light, which supports 20MHz bandwidth in Sub-7GHz band and 100MHz bandwidth in millimeter wave band, respectively. At the same time, 5G RedCap also supports single-receive, half-duplex and other low-complexity features, as well as lower transmission power and other energy-saving technologies, so that a large number of low-cost, low-complexity Internet of things devices can also access the 5G network. In 5G Advanced, 5G RedCap technology will continue to evolve and further reduce complexity, thus more widely supporting the development of the Internet of things.

There is also the integration of space and earth, which is also one of the concerned scenarios in the 5G Advanced phase. Through the integration of non-terrestrial network (NTN) and terrestrial network, the service type and coverage form of mobile communication will be further expanded. At the same time, the integrated space-space network will also carry hundreds of millions of connections to promote the Internet of everything. In R17, Qualcomm has also promoted the development of non-terrestrial network (NTN), including the use of 5G NR framework for satellite communications, fixed wireless access (FWA) backhaul from ground to satellite, and direct provision of low-rate data and voice services for smartphones; on the other hand, it supports low-complexity eMTC and NB-IoT terminal satellite access, further expanding the network coverage of key use cases such as global asset tracking. Non-terrestrial network (NTN) is also part of the work plan of the next 5G standard R18, which will continue to evolve in 5G Advanced.

It can be seen that with the continuous evolution of various technologies in the 5G Advanced phase, 5G will support a richer variety of innovative application scenarios, and will be more widely and deeply applied to many industries to promote digital transformation and upgrading. Dr. Xu Yan, head of R & D of Qualcomm China, has said that based on the existing 5G technology, 5G Advanced will support more extended features, such as NR-Light for Internet of things terminals with lower complexity and expansion in more fields, enhanced industrial Internet of things, non-terrestrial networks, etc., which will enable 5G to enter a wider range of industries and applications, and lay the foundation for the upcoming 6G technology.

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