3GPP Release 17 Feature work

Some of the major features on which 3gpp is working currently on Release 17 is as below:

1.NR MIMO
2.NR sidelink enh
3.52.6 to 71 Ghz with existing waveform
4.Dynamic Spectrum Sharing(DSS) enh.
5.Industrial IoT/URLLC enh.
6. Enh for Small Data.


There are many more features on which work is going on apart from these which I have mentioned above. But my interest was on specifically on these features which I would like to discuss more in my upcoming blogs.You can see the complete list on 3gpp Website.

In this blog , let us talk something about Enhancement for Small Data.

As per RP-193252 on 3gpp , as we know that NR supports RRC_INACTIVE state. Until Release 16 UE does not support data transmission on RRC_INACTIVE state.So any time irrespective of the size of data , UE first needs to move to RRC_CONNECTED state and do the data transmission. Once the transmission is over UE move back to RRC_INACTIVE state if the connection is released. This leads to unnecessary power consumption and signalling overhead.

Some examples of small and infrequent data traffic are:

1. Smartphone Application:

-> Traffic from Instant messaging services (Whatsapp , QQ ,)
->Push notifications from various applications.

2.Non-Smartphone Applications:

->Traffic from wearables( periodic positioning information)
->Sensors
->Smart meters.

I will gather more information on this and come up in my next blog.