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| 24 Understanding the 3GPP ™ Release 15 5G Standard By Emad Farag for Mouser Electronics The new Fifth-Generation (5G) standard is a unified mobile communication framework for our connected, mobile society; it supports high data-speed applications as well as mission-critical communications with ultra- reliable and low-latency requirements, and it connects billions of devices that can communicate with each other autonomously. This is the vision the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) laid out in Recommendation M.2083, issued September 2015. Since then, standard-setting organizations have been racing to identify and develop the technology components necessary not only to support urgent short-term market needs, but also to meet the long-term objectives of 5G. In late 2015, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP™) embarked on a mission to define a new Radio Access Network standard—which came to be known as 5G New Radio (NR)—to meet ITU-R requirements. The standardization effort involved channel modeling of spectrum up to 100 gigahertz (GHz), with its vast potential for larger bandwidth allocation, higher throughput, and lower latencies. It also involved studying the scenarios and requirements for next-generation radio access technologies and the corresponding technology components. 3GPP follows a phased approach to standardization, with each phase referred to as a release. The first phase of 5G NR, which supports enhanced mobile broadband and basic ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) in spectrum up to 52.6GHz, is known as Release 15. The first version of the Release 15 specification became available in December 2017. This article describes the spectra available in 5G NR and the physical layer enabling technologies developed for 5G NR. 5G NR Spectrum Given the insatiable consumer demand for mobile data and higher throughput rates coupled with the vast amount of spectrum available in the 3 to 100GHz spectrum region, it seemed natural for regulators and standard organizations to consider opening and using spectrum in centimeter wave (cmWave) and millimeter wave (mmWave) regions for mobile communication, as well as to consider developing a framework for spectrum sharing with incumbent technologies. In Release 15, 3GPP has defined two frequency ranges: Frequency range 1 (FR1), which extends from 450 megahertz (MHz) to 7.125GHz, and frequency range 2 (FR2), which extends from 24.25 to 52.6GHz (Table 1). Studies about the availability and regulatory requirements of spectrum in the 52.6 to 114.25GHz frequency range are ongoing, as are the potential use cases and deployment scenarios. Dr. Emad Farag is a senior 5G physical layer standards engineer at Nokia ® . He has worked on the physical layer architecture, algorithms, and software of wireless base station modems. Dr. Farag is a subject matter expert in the 5G New Radio (NR) standard, developing techniques to build the 5G standards. Frequency Range Designation Frequency Range Maximum Channel Bandwidth FR1 450MHz to 7.125GHz 100MHz FR2 24.25 to 52.6GHz 400MHz Understudy 52.6 to 114.25GHz TBD Table 1: NR Frequency Ranges [ C O N T ' D O N N E X T P A G E ]

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