L-R: Tony Gray,
chief executive of
TCCA; and Adrian
Scrase, ETSI’s
CTO and 3GPP’s
head of MCC
test scenarios, analyse and report on the results of the tests,
together with considerations on the legal, organisational and
commercial aspects of this approach. Held added that it is
“more of a comprehensive feasibility study than a simple test,
although there will also be technical testing on our testbeds
and in Berlin with some real antennas”.
Held also said that “what we are going to test are exclusively
hybrid solutions, we’re not going to consider a purely
dedicated network or a purely commercial network. We’re
going to test different versions of hybrid solutions, and the
idea might be elaborated and might also change in the long
run. Depending on what the outcome is we will then present
recommendations on how to proceed to our supervisory
board and our customers.”
She explained that BDBOS “won’t become active for the
time being in the area of applications… this is something our
federal states and customers in the states are doing”.
Strength in unity
Turning to cellular technology, Adrian Scrase, ETSI’s CTO
and 3GPP’s head of MCC, gave a presentation on critical
communications standards. He explained that the second
phase of 5G, which will come in Release 16, will complete
“the ultra-reliable low-latency work in its first instance,
together with massive Internet of Things”. He added that
while it is scheduled to be complete in March 2020, “we’re
trying to cram so much into Release 16 that it’s inevitable
there will be some slight delay before that’s completed”,
before noting that it has already slipped by three months. He
said while the contents of Release 17 are not yet known, “a
Scrase said the second phase of 5G,
which will come in Release 16, will
complete “the ultra-reliable low-latency
work in its first instance, together
with massive Internet of Things”
shopping list” for it is building and “we know that there are
some things that should be in Release 16 that will slip, they
will just topple over into Release 17”.
Scrase noted that in addition to the work on
interoperability and interconnection standards, “we also have
some quite interesting work on APIs where we will be able
to expose the networks to external application providers, so
there’s no limit to the imagination as to what you can do
with that from a public safety point of view. We’re even going
to expose the data/analytical components of the core network
externally through APIs; so this concept of opening up the
contents of our core network to external communities, rather
than having this very closed approach, which is the current
approach. You can also see even more work on mission-critical
video and mission-critical data.”
However, Scrase was keen to highlight “some of the work
we’re doing on maritime and railways”. He explained
that in Release 16, 3GPP will analyse these communities’
requirements and compare them with those of public
safety, as “there is a view that says actually there’s not a lot
of difference between the requirements from a performance
point of view. If that’s true, if we can start to cluster these
different user communities because they have very similar
requirements” then it will be possible to realise greater
economies of scale, for example by having a common chipset
for their devices.
Scrase concluded by discussing 5G satellite standardisation.
He explained that 5G will be the first generation to have
an integrated cellular component. This will allow 5G base
stations and user devices to operate hundreds of metres in
the air and in low Earth orbit. “The important thing is that
it’s the same radio so you’re looking at seamless handover
between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, which for
certain things like asset tracking it really starts to get very
interesting in a commercial sense. In the public safety
sense, you can see a lot of reasons why this will be a sensible
thing; maybe you have a disaster somewhere where you
need a lot of radio coverage at short notice – you can
stick a radio base station on a drone and you’ve got an
instantaneous network.”
He added that while this “sounds great”, there is the need
to consider the potential effects of this approach in terms of
radio planning and what it will do to your terrestrial network.
To this end, exhaustive studies are being undertaken. “Once
we understand the complexity, we will then in Release 17
move to standardising that, so by the time we get to Release
17, you will see the normative standards which define how
you can have 5G non-terrestrial radio seamlessly attached to
your terrestrial radio.”
Clearly, there was a great deal of interesting and topical
discussion at BAPCO/CCE 2019. With both FirstNet and
ESN appearing increasingly well positioned and with Finland
and Germany looking to follow in their footsteps (though
potentially with a hybrid approach in Germany’s case), the
push towards mission-critical broadband continues to gather
pace. Judging by Clark’s comments, next year’s BAPCO
Annual Conference and Exhibition should have some very
practical insights in store for us given that his programme
is starting to focus on ensuring that ESN and the services it
enables can work at the operational level.
30 www.criticalcomms.com April 2019
/www.criticalcomms.com