The fifth generation (5G) of mobile radio technologies has been defined as a new delivery model where services are tailored to specific vertical industries. 5G supports three types of services with different and heterogeneous requirements, i.e. enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC). These services are directly related to exemplary verticals such as media, vehicular communications or the Industry 4.0. This work provides a detailed analysis and performance evaluation of 5G New Radio (NR) against a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), as defined in the International Mobile Telecommunications 2020 (IMT-2020) guidelines, and provides an overview about the fulfillment of their associated requirements. The objective of this work is to provide an independent evaluation, complementing the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) contribution. From the original group of sixteen KPIs, eleven of them have been carefully selected, paying special attention to eMBB services. Results show that 5G NR achieves all considered requirements, therefore fulfilling the specific market’s needs for years to come.

3GPP LTE eMBMS release (Rel-) 14, also referred to as further evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (FeMBMS) or enhanced TV (EnTV), is the first mobile broadband technology standard to incorporate a transmission mode designed to deliver terrestrial broadcast services from conventional high power high tower (HPHT) broadcast infrastructure. With respect to the physical layer, the main improvements in FeMBMS are the support of larger inter-site distance for single frequency networks (SFNs) and the ability to allocate 100% of a carrier's resources to the broadcast payload, with self-contained signaling in the downlink. From the system architecture perspective, a receive-only mode enables free-to-air (FTA) reception with no need for an uplink or SIM card, thus receiving content without user equipment registration with a network. These functionalities are only available in the LTE advanced pro specifications as 5G new radio (NR), standardized in 3GPP from Rel-15, has so far focused entirely on unicast. This paper outlines a physical layer design for NR-MBMS, a system derived, with minor modifications, from the 5G-NR specifications, and suitable for the transmission of linear TV and radio services in either single-cell or SFN operation. This paper evaluates the NR-MBMS proposition and compares it to LTE-based FeMBMS in terms of flexibility, performance, capacity, and coverage.

This work presents a potential solution for enabling the use of multicast in the 5G New Radio Release 17, called 5G NR Mixed Mode. The proposed multicast/broadcast mode follows one of the two approaches envisaged in 3GPP, which enables a dynamic and seamless switching between unicast and multicast, both in the downlink and the uplink. This paper also provides a performance evaluation of several IMT-2020 KPIs, including available data rate and spectral efficiency, user and control plane latencies, energy efficiency, and mobility, highlighting the potential advantages of this solution over unicast in relevant scenarios. Finally, other multipoint-based KPIs such as coverage or packet loss rate are also evaluated by means of system level simulations.

This paper provides a detailed performance analysis of the physical layer of two state-of-the-art point-to-multipoint (PTM) technologies: evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) and Advanced Television Systems Committee - Third Generation (ATSC 3.0). The performance of these technologies is evaluated and compared using link-level simulations, considering relevant identified scenarios. A selection of Key Performance Indicators for the International Mobile Telecommunications 2020 (IMT-2020) evaluation process has been considered. Representative use cases are also aligned to the test environments as defined in the IMT-2020 evaluation guidelines. It is observed that ATSC 3.0 outperforms both eMBMS solutions, i.e., MBMS over Single Frequency Networks (MBSFN) and Single-Cell PTM (SC-PTM) in terms of spectral efficiency, peak data rate and mobility, among others. This performance evaluation serves as a benchmark for comparison with a potential 5G PTM solution.

With the spectrum liberation obtained by the deployment of digital terrestrial television and the analog TV switch-off, new bands are being assigned to IMT LTE. In the first cellular deployments in the digital dividend at the 800 MHz band, problems emerged due to the interference cellular networks can cause to DTT signals. Possible solutions imply either an inefficient use of the spectrum (increasing the guard band and reducing the number of DTT channels) or a high cost (using anti-LTE filters for DTT receivers). The new spectrum allocated to mobile communications is the 700 MHz band, also known as the second digital dividend. In this new IMT band, the LTE uplink is placed in the lower part of the band. Hence, the ITU-R invited several studies to be performed and reported the results to WRC-15. In this article, we analyze the coexistence problem in the 700 MHz band and evaluate the interference of LTE signals to DTT services. Several coexistence scenarios have been considered, and laboratory tests have been performed to measure interference protection ratios.

Current Internet of Things (IoT) stacks are frequently focused on handling an increasing volume of data that require a sophisticated interpretation through analytics to improve decision making and thus generate business value. In this paper, a cognitive IoT architecture based on FIWARE IoT principles is presented. The architecture incorporates a new cognitive component that enables the incorporation of intelligent services to the FIWARE framework, allowing to modernize IoT infrastructures with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. This allows to extend the effective life of the legacy system, using existing assets and reducing costs. Using the architecture, a cognitive service capable of predicting with high accuracy the vessel port arrival is developed and integrated in a legacy sea traffic management solution. The cognitive service uses automatic identification system (AIS) and maritime oceanographic data to predict time of arrival of ships. The validation has been carried out using the port of Valencia. The results indicate that the incorporation of AI into the legacy system allows to predict the arrival time with higher accuracy, thus improving the efficiency of port operations. Moreover, the architecture is generic, allowing an easy integration of the cognitive services in other domains.