Cooperation Between Automotive and Public Safety Sector Essential for Further Development of 5G & 6G

In order to receive a good level of support from the 3GPP, verticals should cooperate more intensively and these kind of cooperations are critical.

According to the latest update on the development of the work within the 3GPP on critical communications earlier this month (hosted by the TCCA), Chairman of 3GPP RAN Balasz Bertenyi said that the technology move from 4G to 5G is not really such a big jump. The biggest challenge for the critical communications community and people that are active in the public safety environment, is to move from digital narrowband to 4G,....and it doesn't matter from whatever system (TETRA, TETRAPOL or P25) you are migrating from.

When we look at the technical standards, all of the expected developments have already being developed; from radio standards, to spectrum bands, to applications, etc. However, what the 3GPP is currently aiming at (from a standard point of view), is to make sure that once organizations have made the jump to 4G, this wagon is going to carry them all the way from generation to generation to generation, i.e 4G to 5G and later in about 10 years time, from 5G to 6G. But first, to reap the benefits of that train, you need to jump on it first, in terms of deployments, government policies and government investment.

When we take a closer look at 5G, on one side more and more verticals entering the 5G space and on the other side, the most important element is to find commonalities and cut some compromises with like minded friendly verticals. Once that has been realized, it is time to present a common proposal to the 3GPP.

Bertenyi said: "The key challenge is that verticals often cannot think in silos, but in order to be successful, they have to think in harmonizing functionalities across several verticals. We have already seen some very good examples on the development of DMO (Direct MOde), initialized, by the critical communications and the automotive industry endorsed by a commercial push from some of the operators. They have found common ground on functionalities for device to device communication on 5G and there has been some very good progress along those lines. Similarly for multicast. Now we're we're venturing into multicast standardization for 5G. The critical communications industry is not alone and they have to find common ground with, for example; broadcaster's or/and with the automotive sector. The more functionalities we look at, the more commonality we can find. So these verticals are your friends, and they're your friends for a very long time, simply because in many situations they have/need similar functionalities."

In order to receive a good level of support from the 3GPP, verticals should cooperate more intensively and these kind of cooperations are critical. Good and effective cooperation makes the proposal successful within a very difficult prioritization of package approval process, where the 3GPP decides on what new activities to start when a new release begins.