I have spent last months with preparing the launch of so called 5G stand-alone (SA) in my job at Ericsson together with the operator “3”, TV4 Sweden, TV2 Denmark and Sony. With two events, one in Sweden (1st June) and one in Denmark (5th June). There has already been press releases made by Ericsson and 3. But I would like to share with you in the blog some background and general information on the new technology we now see available for first time in Sweden and Denmark.
We can now say that 5G has been completed in Sweden and Denmark, and business development for new use cases can now start!
5G Stand-alone
So, starting with the question – what is 5G SA?
The 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) has now been rolled out for a few years and will soon be completed. However, even if the RAN hardware has been rolled out in most places and has given greater capacity in the network with beamforming radios for enhanced mobile broadband. The 5G traffic did still rely on a 4G for controls in the backbone/core network. Then called 5G non-stand alone (NSA).
Now when also core network has been upgraded, 5G traffic can be processed on its own. Besides benefits of reduced overhead. More importantly, it makes it possible to use the network in new ways which enables much more flexibility to handle certain users, or user groups with special requirements.
Network Slicing
By handling certain users, and even certain applications with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters and functions across the network end-to-end. From the device ➜ RAN ➜ transport ➜ core network ➜ IP network (if owned by operator) ➜ application server. To identify each type of different performance level an ID called S-NSSAI (+ URSP for differentiation between apps) is used in each part.
Since spectrum is the most scarce resource in the network and the main bottleneck for performance and latency, an advance functionality called Dynamic Shared Resource Sharing has been created by many RAN vendors. Which can reserve parts of the bandwidth within one or more carriers. But if a user with reserved bandwidth does not need the full amount, others can use it. Just as the user with reserved bandwidth can use bandwidth outside of what is reserved, if no one else needs them. See figure below for illustration.
Stockholm Marathon
So, this is what has been used in the Swedish event, when Stockholm Marathon was recorded by TV4 with remote controlled cameras using 3’s 5G SA network. They relied on 3’s commercial 3.5 GHz TDD mid-band (beamforming) and utilized network slicing to differentiate broadcasting cameras to mobile broadband subscribers. And this was the first time network slicing was done in Sweden.
Denmark vs Sweden at Parken
Another way to reserve spectrum and secure a certain performance level is to create dedicated spectrum. Meaning a full carrier can only be accessed for a specific group of users. It is more of a brute force solution, but if there are spectrum available which is unused (very rare) it can be preferred, as it require much less time for configuration, optimization, and testing.
This was the case in the Danish event, in the national arena “Parken” for a sold-out friendship football game against Sweden. When Danish TV2 had 2-4 cameras broadcasting wireless over 3’s 5G SA.
It was possible since 3 Denmark has 120 MHz in the 3.5 GHz band (beamforming) so they could dedicate 20 MHz statically for TV2. This would be enough for 1 or 2 cameras but since they want to prove the future concept of a full arena, also mmWave technology with 800 MHz bandwidth was used.
When using mmWave and 3.5 GHz bands together, it is called Dual Connectivity and since mmWave is not very common in Europe yet, like Sweden has not even had auction yet for mmWave spectrum. No devices were not available for dual connectivity before this. Actually, the device we used was made on request by Head of Technology at TV2 and was used for first time in this event. Besides support for the mmWave and 3.5 GHz TDD mid-band in Dual Connectivity mode, it also has a very large heatsink compared to a smartphone or pocket modem, as broadcasting will need to transmit 100% uplink time.
Before this event, wireless broadcasting has been possible by working around the problem of unreliable performance. By having up 8 SIM cards and mixing multiple operators. To then aggregate data from each SIM card together. Besides that it could still be unreliable, it creates high cost of 8 modems supporting each SIM card, but also gives high latency from processing all the data aggregation. In the event, TV2 could instead use a single SIM card for each camera. With steady 33 Mbps uplink, they could get down to 250 ms latency (glass-to-glass) at 1080p@50Hz. Which previously could be over 1 second of latency, with problems for the production team when switching between cameras for seamless user experience.
Setup
- 5G SA Dual Connectivity (NR-DC)
- 20 MHz bandwidth at 3.5 GHz TDD mid-band
- 800 MHz mmWave (400 MHz in uplink per device)
- Sony PDT-FP1 5G transmitter
- Qualcomm X70 chipset
- Haivision PRO460 video encoder
- H.265 video codec
