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Satellites enable the provision of global 5G coverage utilizing a customized protocol stack for direct access of 5G devices. This paper reports the results of a field trial based on an Open Source Software (OSS) 5G protocol stack modified for Satellite Communications. 5G New Radio (NR) functions have been adapted to support 3GPP Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) standardization for Release 17. Some of the currently discussed enhancements for 5G New Radio (NR) direct access for NTNs were evaluated in this study utilizing a geosynchronous satellite system. Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) devices and base station were software-defined solutions communicating via satellite through a standardized 5G NR waveform. The results show that Open Source Software (OSS) implementations running on general purpose platforms greatly support the research and standardization process for 5G-Beyond NTNs. New functions related to NTNs can be evaluated at an early stage over channel emulators or real world satellites to highlight the capabilities of space based 5G-Beyond networks. Therefore, OSS can be a starting point to turn the vision of 6G protocols on-board the satellite into reality.

Dedicated fifth generation (5G) positioning networks are envisaged as a key technology to complement Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in challenging situations, such as safety-critical automotive and aerial applications. These 5G networks are explicitly designed to fulfil the positioning needs in a specific environment, by using dedicated pilot signals and locating the base stations (BSs) in favorable conditions for user reception. To prove this concept, the Hybrid Overlay Positioning with 5G and GNSS (HOP-5G) testbed demonstrates the enhanced positioning capabilities resulting from the deployment of ground and aerial BSs. This paper presents a preliminary assessment of the first real-time ranging measurements obtained with a flying BS in a dedicated 5G positioning network. Under hovering and optimal conditions, field results obtained over an 80 MHz downlink bandwidth indicate a ranging precision below 1 m in 95% of cases.

Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) has been introduced in 5G new radio for new applications that have strict reliability and latency requirements such as augmented/virtual reality, industrial automation and autonomous vehicles. The first full set of the physical layer design of 5G release, Release 15, was finalized in December 2017. It provided a foundation for URLLC with new features such as flexible sub-carrier spacing, a sub-slot-based transmission scheme, new channel quality indicator, new modulation and coding scheme tables, and configured-grant transmission with automatic repetitions. The second 5G release, Release 16, was finalized in December 2019 and allows achieving improved metrics for latency and reliability to support new use cases of URLLC. A number of new features such as enhanced physical downlink (DL) control channel monitoring capability, new DL control information format, sub-slot physical uplink (UL) control channel transmission, sub-slot-based physical UL shared channel repetition, enhanced mobile broadband and URLLC inter-user-equipment multiplexing with cancellation indication and enhanced power control were standardized. This article provides a detailed overview of the URLLC features from 5G Release 15 to Release 16 by describing how these features allow meeting URLLC target requirements in 5G networks. The ongoing Release 17 targets further enhanced URLLC operation by improving mechanisms such as feedback, intra-user-equipment multiplexing and prioritization of traffic with different priority, support of time synchronization and new quality of service related parameters. In addition, a fundamental feature targeted in URLLC Release 17 is to enable URLLC operation over shared unlicensed spectrum. The potential directions of URLLC research in unlicensed spectrum in Release 17 are presented to serve as a bridge from URLLC in licensed spectrum in Release 16 to URLLC in unlicensed spectrum in Release 17.

Abstract Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is one of the vertical sectors that will benefit from 5G communication systems, but today, these systems are still dominated by technologies such as ZigBee and WiFi. An M2M scenario will experience dense deployment of ZigBee and WiFi nodes in order to route the data from one end to the other. In the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band, both of the technologies perform co-channel overlapped operation and hence face severe cross technology co-channel interference (CCI). In contrast to cellular systems, which solve the CCI by centralized coordination through the base station, addressing CCI in the ISM band is non-trivial due to heterogeneous wireless technologies and the lack of centralized coordination. In this work, we first present interference mitigating receiver architectures for OFDM-based WiFi using single and multiple antennas. Our single antenna work is based on the localized estimation of excess noise caused by single and multiple co-channel narrowband interferers and scaling the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) of the affected WiFi subcarriers. The simulation shows our method achieves a significant gain in SNR compared to the conventional method for a given packet error rate (PER) criterion. Next, we discuss maximal ratio combiner with LLR scaling (MLSC), which is a multi-antenna extension to our previous work. The simulation shows MLSC achieves diversity gain apart from the gain in SNR. Further, we propose soft-bit maximal ratio combiner with LLR scaling (SB-MLSC). SB-MLSC is an easy to implement version of MLSC. However, diversity combining in SB-MLSC is performed by combining the LLRs. Nonetheless, simulations show equivalence in performance by SB-MLSC and MLSC. Finally, as a significant part of this work, we implemented all our methods using a software-defined radio (SDR) and performed over-the-air (OTA) testing in the 2.4-GHz ISM band using standard WiFi and ZigBee frames. Results of OTA tests fall in complete agreement with our simulations indicating the practical applicability of our methods. Our methods apply to all the standards and related radio transmission techniques which are based on OFDM and face narrowband co-channel interference. Additionally, since our work focuses only on receiver side modifications, they can be integrated with the existing infrastructure with minimal modifications.

Abstract This editorial sums up relevant topics on the assessment of wireless communication systems covered by the especial issue entitled “Experimental Evaluation in Wireless Communications.” The topics include practical aspects on the implementation of distributed asynchronous non-linear kernel methods over wireless sensor networks; localization methods based on the exploitation of radio-frequency identification (RFID) wireless sensors and cellular networks or on sparsity approximations; channel sounding and assessment of broadband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless systems in high-speed vehicular communications; coexistence analysis of femtocell-based and outdoor-to-indoor systems; techniques for peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction; new solutions for baseband and radio frequency (RF) hardware impairments in full-duplex wireless systems; and, finally, suitability of interference alignment for broadband indoor wireless communications.