GSMA news article for 3GPP

December 16, 2015

Industry Collaboration Driving Standards in the IoT, by Dr Shane Rooney, Executive Director, GSMA

The GSMA’s Mobile IoT Initiative is a collaboration of 26 mobile operators, OEMs, chipset, module and infrastructure companies, formed to accelerate the development and commercial availability of Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) solutions in licensed spectrum.

LPWA networks are designed for M2M applications that have low data rates, require long battery lives and operate unattended for long periods of time, often in remote locations. They are expected to be used for a wide variety of applications such as industrial asset tracking, safety monitoring, water and gas metering, smart grids, city parking, vending machines and city lighting. The technology will also be used to connect wearable devices for people or animals.

Due to the diversity of IoT application requirements, some technologies are better at addressing particular LPWA use cases. For this reason, we encourage 3GPP to agree three common and complementary licensed standards that will cover all LPWA use cases. These are Narrow Band IoT (NB_IoT), Extended Coverage GPRS (EC-GPRS ^[1]) and LTE Machine Type Communication (LTE_MTC) in Release 13.

The timing of Release 13 has motivated the Mobile IoT Initiative to act decisively to agree these technologies which, once approved, will ensure that they are commercially available and in market as quickly as possible providing customers with a choice which will accelerate adoption and help the Internet of Things to flourish.

GSA hails LTE Broadcast growth

November, 2015
Evaluating the LTE Broadcast Opportunity, a report published by the Global mobile Suppliers Association, monitors 30 Operator field trials of eMBMS services and documents the number of enabled devices - listing 96 products in trials or with chips sets that would allow them to be used for LTE Broadcast services.

The report predicts that LTE Broadcast will reach two billion customers by 2020, for a variety of uses in addition to mobile broadcast TV, including:

• Innovative stadium entertainment services
• Emergency broadcast systems
• Distribution of public and transport information
• Software and firmware upgrades for computers and IoT-connected devices

Bringing 5G in to Focus - Services

October 13, 2015

A new white paper from 4G Americas evolves the trade association's thinking on 5G Requirements and Solutions.

The paper considers the pressure to deliver initial features before 2020 and looks at the bigger picture, that allows more "time for technology breakthroughs that
deserve the moniker 5G".

Although bringing a North American perspective, the key use cases and key challenges and requirements covered are Universal.

GCF Certification in sync with 3GPP

September 8, 2015

The latest edition of the GCF Certification News confirms that 60% of current device certification is for LTE systems and establishes the Forum's commitment to ensuring that "the scope of certification remains in sync with the steady stream of enhancements and new features that continue to emerge from 3GPP."

The GCF sees Carrier Aggregation as the focus of much of its work, acknowledging the importance of 3GPP's Band Combination Capability Signaling (BCCS) - which allows a device to advise the network which bands it is capable of supporting.

The GCF has recently approved a Work Item Description to verify Rel-11 BCCS and now also has an umbrella Work Item Description for the certification of Rel-12 devices incorporating LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation with three downlinks. The GCF reports that "So far, 42 inter-frequency combinations have been identified for 3DL Carrier Aggregation."

Security Paper and Workshop Presentations

July 1, 2015

The updated ETSI White paper on "Security for ICT" now includes important new information on the work being done for the "Cyber", "Cloud" and "IoT" security in ETSI groups. The paper also covers 3GPP with dedicated sections on GSM, UMTS & LTE and details of current security aspects of 3GPP work on:

• Machine Type Communications (MTC),
• Public Warning Systems,
• Proximity Services (ProSe) and Group Communication over LTE
• Mission Critical Push To Talk over LTE (MCPTT)
• Spoofed Call Detection and Prevention,
• Security Assurance Specification (SAS) for the MME network product class,
• Subscriber privacy,
• Single Sign On frameworks between 3GPP networks and user-centric Web services.

Although the paper does not cover 5G specifically, it does demonstrate effectively how future systems call for security capabilities beyond what has been previously available and provides a snap shot of what ETSI and 3GPP are doing to meet the challenge.