5G-RANGE was present at the EuCNC 2018 (Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 18-21)
5G-RANGE – PHY Layer for the 5G Remote Area Applications (demonstration)
Nowadays, the main research efforts on 5G networks aim for improving the data rate, reduce latency and increase the number of connections. Besides these efforts, one important scenario is not being intensively researched, which is the coverage in remote and rural areas. The main goal of the 5G-RANGE project is to conceive and implement a 5G operation mode that can provide reliable Internet access in remote areas, with significant social and economic impacts. 5G-RANGE will provide the telecommunications infrastructure to allow those living in low populate areas to have reliable Internet access. This solution will also support the agribusiness automation, allowing for using IoT for improving farms productions in the so-called smart farms. Other applications, such as road coverage and high-speed train connections, will benefit from the wide coverage provided by 5G-RANGE. The 5G-RANGE PHY must overcome several challenges. Cognitive radio techniques shall be employed to reduce operational costs. Hence, the waveform must have low out-ofband emissions and spectrum flexibility to support dynamic frequency allocation. The waveform also must achieve high spectrum efficiency under a double-dispersive channel with long delay profile. Finally, stateof-the-art channel codes and MIMO schemes must be used to provide robustness for large cell coverage. The main aim of this demonstration is to show the preliminary results achieved by the 5G-RANGE Project in terms of the PHY for Remote Area Applications. The transceiver is entirely implemented in hardware and is able to operate in real-time at high data rates. We will demonstrate that the conceived PHY layer is able to achieve very low out-of-band emissions, which allows spectrum agility by just turning off subcarriers in undesired spectrum bands. The system robustness is assured by a flexible Polar Code, which can be configured to operate at different code rates and by a MIMO diversity scheme to enhance robustness.
