5G Time Critical Services Boost Productivity and Efficiency of Industrial Operations

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Modern 5G networks have introduced technologies such as Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) support to address a host of time critical networking needs. Today, 5G Americas, the voice of 5G and 4G LTE for the Americas, announced the release of its latest white paper covering time critical services in 5G networks entitled, “Understanding 5G and Time Critical Services”.

Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas, said, “The continued advancements of fifth generation of wireless cellular standards and networks will address new enterprise and industrial use cases. These complex use cases often require data delivery within a specified time duration with a high degree of guaranteed reliability.”

According to the white paper, time-critical services require the services’ clients and servers across the network to be strictly synchronized, and its underlying communication network to be ultra-reliable and strictly latency-bounded. URLLC and TSN features in 5G will help support an array of use cases spanning across automotive, transportation, healthcare, education, media production, forestry, public safety, banking, utilities and much more.

Support for Time Critical Services over 5G networks have been incorporated in various enhancements in Release 16 and Release 17. The white paper describes how these technologies are impacting legacy networks based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) that have traditionally provided required timing accuracy, as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE 802.1 TSN standard that is becoming the converged networking technology for factories to enable deterministic and low-latency communication.

“Understanding 5G and Time Critical Services” explores the following key topics:

• Key use cases and requirements
• Technology enablers in 5G Release 16 and 17
• 5G architecture supporting time synchronization, IEEE TSN, and application function (AF) Requested Time Sensitive Communication
• Timing Service resiliency
• Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication
• Time synchronization accuracy and services
• Security of Timing as a Service (TaaS) over 5G

Fatih Ulupinar, Principal Engineer, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and 5G Americas working group leader, said, “Ultra reliable low latency and time-sensitive networking can bring ubiquitous and smooth connectivity while meeting the real-time requirements. They have the potential to unleash new use cases and applications for automation and will lay the foundation for Industry 4.0.” He further added, “Time sensitive networking can provide guaranteed data delivery in a guaranteed time window, making it a key enabler technology for an enhanced automated 5G ecosystem.”

Engineers from Intel and Qualcomm led the working group that authored the paper.