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MAY 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 19 5G Use Cases According to Hall, the 3GPP—the standards body responsible for 5G—is simultaneously working on additional wireless technologies to support more of the IoT use case. "This is a little bit of a shift from years past, where we start with GSM, then we did 3G, then we did LTE, and we saw people attempt to use the cellular technology to support the non-cellular use case. An example of that is in automobiles, there's a tech- nology called OnStar, which uses CDMA network— 2G mobile commu- nications—to radio a base station if there's a problem with the vehicle. Obviously, CDMA wasn't designed for that use case, but it's a good enough technol- ogy to solve that problem," says Hall. Hall says 3GPP is shifting towards design- ing one flavor of stan- dards for mobile broadband, a different flavor for the IoT, and even a different flavor for automotive. Two of the technologies that are actively being devel - oped—one of them is called NB-IoT (Narrow- band IoT), is an implementation effectively like LTE, that's designed for low-power, long-range transmissions and to support many devices on the network. Another one that's happening in parallel is LTE V-to-X and 5G V-to-X, which is a vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard based on some of the 5G and LTE technologies, but designed for high-doppler situations, such as moving vehicles communicating with each other. Machine-to-Machine Communications As the manufacturing industry moves toward a smarter manufacturing vision, it will be needing more and more machine communica- tions. So how is 5G impacting or helping that? Some of the critical requirements for machine- type communications are: the latency— tight synchronization between one device transmit- ting and another device receiving; the robust- ness of that communication; and low-power consumption. "Those transmissions tend to be lower data rate, but you also have the desire for them to be lower power, too, especially when you have many devices in the network—you don't want to consume a significant amount of power," says Hall. "All of those reasons are why, ultimately, many of the machine type commu - nications will use the NB-IoT standard. The NB-IoT stan- dard addresses the low-power consid- erations, uses a relatively small amount of spec- trum, so you can have a lot of devices in your network, and the improvements to the MAC and PHY layers of 5G address some of the latency and reliability concerns, which are important in machine-type communication environments." The Future of the T&M Industry There's certainly a tremendous amount of change in the industry. Hall says every time you get a new major innovation, and a signifi- cant change in measurement type, you see an opportunity for disruption. "And there are a couple of opportunities that we are seeing right now. In the mobile communications space, the advent of millime- ter-wave and the challenges associated with millimeter-wave test are creating an opportu- nity for disruption. The test and measurement vendors that can address that measurement challenge first will find themselves in a good position in the market. We also see opportu- nities in the automotive space. With vehicle