New ITU focus group to consider tactile and haptic communications
While it’s still working toward nailing down 5G performance requirements for a global 5G specification, the IMT-2020 standard, the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is already looking beyond 2020 to 2030. Specifically, the newly established ITU Focus Group on Technologies for Network 2030 will consider the long-term evolution of 5G and develop future ICT use cases.
In announcing the new focus group, the ITU called out future use cases, including holograms, a “new generation” of AR/VR, and “high-precision communications for ‘tactile’ and ‘haptic’ applications in need of processing a very high volume of data in near real-time.”
As it relates to IMT-2020, the ITU has detailed minimum performance requirements in service of the three primary 5G use cases—enhanced mobile broadband, massive IoT and ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC):
- 20 Gpbs peak downlink data rate and 10 Gbps peak uplink data rate
- Peak spectral efficiency of 30 bps/Hz in the downlink and 15 bps/Hz in the uplink
- User experienced data rate of 100 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink
- And user plane latency of 4 milliseconds for enhanced mobile broadband and 1 millisecond for URLLC
ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao said the focus group’s work “will provide network system experts around the globe with a very valuable international reference point from which to guide the innovation required to support ICT use cases through 2030.”
The new focus group is co-chaired by Mehmet Toy of Verizon, Alexey Borodin of Rostelecom, Yuan Zhang of China Mobile and Yutaka Miyake of KDDI Research.
Speaking of the future use cases, Huawei Chief Scientist Richard Li said, “Holographic type communications will have a big part to play in industry, agriculture, education, entertainment – and in many other fields. Supporting such capabilities will call for very high throughput in the range of hundreds of gigabits per second or even higher.”
The Network 2030 group will first meet on Oct. 2 at NYU in Brooklyn, New York.
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