URLLC – for ultra-reliable low latency communications – is a set of specifications defined by 3GPP – an international cooperation body between telecommunications standardization organizations – for 5G mobile networks.
URLLC
These technical requirements must address specific use cases in different sectors such as industry, transport, medicine, or entertainment.
The target applications include advanced industrial robotics, remote control, autonomous vehicles, computer-assisted surgery, emergency medicine, and extended reality.
These sometimes critical applications require extremely short response times and uninterrupted network connectivity.
Also, URLLC technology promises end-to-end latency lower than 1 ms and reliability of more than 99.999 %.
These performances are based on technologies such as Network Slicing and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), which make it possible to limit the causes of latency in mobile networks.
Network Slicing – cutting the network up into multiple logical sub-networks – makes it possible to configure the mobile network and adapt quality of service to the needs of different kinds of applications in real time.
Multi-access Edge Computing, or multi-access, is a type of network architecture that provides cloud computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the network. It thus runs the applications (and processes the associated data) closer to the users to make them perform better.
Factory automation, smart transport systems, telesurgery, or cloud gaming… URLLC will enable these emerging concepts to become reality in the coming years.
