5G-RedCap – Ericsson Whitepaper
RedCap – expanding the 5G device ecosystem for consumers and industries.
For more on this topic also check out the Ericsson blog post HERE covering a discussion on standardisation aspects for Rel-17 RedCap and Rel-18 eRedCap.
Since the number of personal smartphone subscriptions is limited by the size of the human population, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is predicted to have a stronger growth than smartphone subscriptions in the coming years. The IoT segment served by cellular networks can be divided into Massive IoT, Broadband IoT, Critical IoT, and Industrial Automation IoT, where Broadband IoT is forecasted to constitute 60 percent of the cellular IoT connections by the end of 2028. Broadband IoT includes both wide- area and local-area use cases that require higher throughput, lower latency, and larger data volumes than what Massive IoT technologies can support. These use cases include, for example, smart wearables and industrial sensors. In the past, Broadband IoT use cases were often served by 4G long-term evolution (LTE) device categories 1 and 4. The device complexity, and hence the device cost, has so far been too high for 5G New Radio (NR) to be suited to Broadband IoT, which motivated the introduction of reduced capability (RedCap) 5G NR devices in 3GPP Release 17.
Figure 1 illustrates different 4G/5G device types. At the low end, there is the NB-IoT device category (Cat-NB1) and the LTE-M device category (Cat-M1), which both support relatively low data rates suitable for Massive IoT use cases. Since 3GPP Release 15, both NB-IoT and LTE-M fulfill the 5G massive machine-type communications (mMTC) requirements and are therefore components of both 4G and 5G. At the high end, both LTE and NR have device types for high peak rates for demanding use cases. In between the low and the high end, LTE offers several device categories (that is, Cat-1/2/3/4), and RedCap provides corresponding NR-based device types for this mid-range segment.
Figure 1
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5G-RedCap – Ericsson Whitepaper
