Ericsson said it teamed up with China Mobile to conduct the world’s first 5G-enabled drone prototype field trial. At the the trial, held in Wuxi in China’s Jiangsu province, a drone controlled by the operator’s network flew with handovers between cells across multiple sites.
Ericsson said the potential use cases for drones could include support for emergency services and emphasised the importance of reactive networks with end-to-end low latency to ensure the safety and reliability of such functions.
Ericsson earlier in August gave the latest in a series of live demonstrations of the potential of 5G with Singtel, featuring live video streaming and where its prototype radios achieved a peak throughput of 27.5 Gbps and latency as low as 2ms.
Ericsson and China Mobile, who in June together demoed their latest internet of things (IoT) technology at the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai 2016, have collaborated in the China National Key 5G Project since the beginning of the year, focusing on user-centric 5G network architecture evolution.
Optimisation of latency is one of the project's key aims and the Swedish group said the drone trial marked an important test of the ability to ensure the success of mission-critical use cases by successfully deploying the 5G network at the edge of a cell before handing over to the next.
The telecoms industry expects 2020 to mark the commercial launch of 5G, which as well as providing much faster data transfer speeds than 4G aims to enable universal roll-out out of machine to machine (M2M) communication or IoT by avoiding a drop in speed or connection no matter how many people are connected to a cell at the same time.
Low latency is crucial for the success of the as-yet-undefined standard and the 2ms delay achieved by the Singtel demo compares with far slower reaction times achievable with LTE.
