Key planning and implementation concerns that will guarantee the success of 5G time-critical services are highlighted in a whitepaper from an industry trade organization for top telecommunications service providers and manufacturers.

5G time-critical services and networks will continue to improve, addressing new enterprise and industrial use cases. Modern 5G networks are speeding up the adoption of technologies like ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) and time-sensitive networking (TSN) support to meet various time-critical networking needs to accomplish these improvements.

Such complicated use cases frequently call for data delivery within a specific time frame with a high level of guaranteed reliability, according to a study paper from 5G Americas.

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The regional industry trade organization for leading telcos, service providers, and manufacturers, which sees itself as the voice of 5G and LTE for the Americas, covered the topic of time-critical services in 5G networks in the paper titled “Understanding 5G and time-critical services,” noting that 5G time-critical services demand the services’ clients and servers across the network to be strictly synchronized and the underlying communication network to be ultra-reliable and secure.

It further stated that URLLC and 5G technologies would assist a variety of use cases, including those in banking, utilities, forestry, public safety, media production, healthcare, and other vertical industries.

The whitepaper also demonstrated how different improvements to Releases 16 and 17 of the 3GPP mobile communications standard had been made to accommodate 5G time-critical services over networks. It discussed how these technologies were affecting both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE 802.1 TSN standard, which is evolving into the converged networking technology for factories to enable deterministic and low-latency communication, and legacy networks based on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), which have historically provided the necessary timing accuracy.

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The study also highlighted important use cases and requirements, technology enablers for 5G Releases 16 and 17, the 5G architecture’s support for time synchronization, IEEE TSN and application function (AF), requested time-critical communication, timing service resiliency, ultra-reliable low-latency communication, time synchronization accuracy and services, and security of timing as a service (TaaS) over 5G.

Working group members who created the document were engineers from Qualcomm and Intel. Principal engineer at Qualcomm Technologies and head of the 5G Americas working group Fatih Ulupinar commented on the study and its findings, saying: “Ultra-reliable low-latency and time-critical networking can bring ubiquitous and smooth connectivity while meeting the real-time requirements.”

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“They have the potential to unleash new use cases and automation applications and will lay the foundation for Industry 4.0. 5G time-critical networking can provide guaranteed data delivery in a guaranteed time window, making it a key enabler technology for an enhanced automated 5G ecosystem,” added Ulupinar.

5G Americas outlined 3 key takeaways:

• Many industrial sectors have TCS use cases that require bounded latency and a guaranteed level of reliability.
• The TCS use cases in a specific industrial sector can have a wide range of time-criticality requirements.
• The coverage considerations of one industrial sector can go beyond the local area and would therefore require network deployment in a wide area.

According to research published in June 2022 by 5G Americas, after three full years of consistent growth, global wireless 5G adoption had reached a rapid acceleration phase and the milestone of 701 million connections by the end of the first quarter of 2022. This is further evidence of the strong growth of 5G networks in the Americas.

By the end of the first quarter of 2022, there were 224 5G commercial networks worldwide. The trade association predicted that number to rise to 313 by the end of 2022 and 352 by 2024, reflecting robust 5G network investment growth across several global regions.