5G RedCap is here, but can it really replace Cat.4 and Cat.1?

In this case, RedCap became the industry's solution to these problems.

Performance compromise: RedCap targets high-speed application scenarios in the Internet of Things

After tailoring, not only the complexity of the RedCap terminal is reduced, but also the cost based on the above solution. The industry predicts that the cost of RedCap modules will be significantly lower than that of eMBB, and the price will probably be less than 200 yuan.

At present, the price of Cat.4 communication modules on the market is between 60-80 yuan. After the large-scale commercial use of RedCap, the price of the module may be comparable to the price of the Cat.4 module.

Since the sword refers to the medium and high-speed Internet of Things application scenario, its opponent is not only Cat.4. In Rel-17, it aims to replace Cat.4, and in the follow-up Rel-18, another version will be defined. At that time, the maximum bandwidth of RedCap will be 5MHz, designed to replace Cat.1.

Also from the perspective of cost, the current price of Cat.1 modules has dropped between 30-40 yuan. With the application of Cat.1 in various vertical industries in the future, the price can still be further dropped to about 20 yuan. At that time, the RedCap communication module that replaces Cat.1 is expected to be around 50 yuan. Whether it can successfully take over the handover depends on the healthy development of the entire industry chain ecology.

In other words, although the cost of RedCap will be greatly reduced compared to high-performance 5G modules, compared with 4G modules, the cost of initial commercial use is still much higher.

It took many years for the cost of 4G modules to drop to this level and the shipments reached more than 100 million. Therefore, the reduction of RedCap costs will also need to go through the test of time and shipments. Since RedCap faces relatively low-value IoT scenarios, its application fields are also highly cost-sensitive, which will limit the development of RedCap industry applications to a certain extent.

Competing with 4G, 5G still needs new breakthroughs

After so many years of development, 4G networks have been recognized by the industry and even users in all aspects. In the competition with 4G, the 5G network is not only able to rely on higher transmission rate, lower power consumption and lower latency and more enhanced performance, but requires more breakthroughs. In fact, 5G is indeed working towards newer and more likely directions.

Taking the addition of the positioning function as an example, based on the previous cellular network positioning technology, 5G R16 introduced a new positioning reference signal (PRS), using DL-TDOA, UL-TDOA, DL-AoD, UL-AOA, E-CID and more. Various positioning technologies are used to jointly improve the positioning accuracy.

At the same time, due to the increase in the number and diversity of reference points in the ultra-dense network in the 5G era, Massive MIMO multi-beam can make AoA estimation more accurate, and lower network delay can improve the accuracy of time-based measurement, etc. These advantages can be further improved 5G positioning capability.

According to 3GPP R16 definition, 5G positioning capability must meet the following minimum requirements:

• For 80% of the terminals, the horizontal positioning accuracy is better than 50 meters and the vertical positioning accuracy is better than 5 meters.
• End-to-end latency is less than 30 seconds.

For demanding business use cases, 5G positioning capabilities need to meet at least the following requirements:

• For 80% of the terminals, the horizontal positioning accuracy is better than 3 meters (indoor) and 10 meters (outdoor).
• For 80% of the terminals, the vertical positioning accuracy is better than 3 meters (indoor and outdoor).
• The end-to-end delay is less than 1 second.

From the perspective of indoor positioning, 5G not only provides its own in-band positioning capability in indoor positioning, but also provides integrated positioning capability. Comprehensive positioning is performed through Bluetooth, UWB and other technologies and information from positioning terminals. The advantages between technologies Complementary, reduce the cost of comprehensive positioning, improve positioning accuracy and robustness.

At present, the integrated application business based on location services has been initially developed, including automobile assembly using 5G + Bluetooth positioning to meet its production positioning needs, power energy using 5G + UWB positioning to meet production needs; in airport indoor positioning services, using 5G + Bluetooth positioning to meet consumer demand User navigation and manager needs; 5G+Bluetooth AOA positioning is used in warehousing and logistics scenarios to meet intelligent logistics management.

Also, the combination of 5G and passive IoT. Recently, China Mobile and Huawei launched a cellular IoT eIoT technology, which is a new type of passive IoT technology that combines 5G with UHF RFID. Features of this technology include:

• Coverage improvement, inter-station resource coordination and joint scheduling optimization, centralized transceiver and distributed incentives, to avoid interference between reading and writing to improve communication distance. In China Mobile's test, the coverage of 200m outdoors and 20m indoors can be achieved.
• Reduced cost and power consumption, minimalist protocol stack and signaling design, reduced cost and power consumption of passive IoT devices.
• It supports sub-meter positioning and provides high-precision indoor positioning in combination with cellular-based 5G positioning technology.
• Enable local/wide area networking, end-to-end network architecture design, expand the capability of cellular systems to support passive Internet of Things, and realize wide-area tag positioning and sensor information collection.

And these can just solve the problems of no basic network and short working distance that traditional RFID technology faces.

Compared with the independent deployment of UHF RFID readers, based on the advantages of 5G covering a large area, this solution has a longer working distance and can reduce user deployment costs. In addition, under this scheme, the high-precision positioning capability is calculated by the ToA or TDoA algorithm adopted by the 5G small base station, and the tag only acts as a signal transmitter.

The application of eIoT technology means that with the help of 5G, RFID will be given more capabilities, which will further stimulate the application of tags faster and more. In turn, the 5G network is no longer just the function of completing data transmission, but has more practical value.

write at the end

From the perspective of past development, communication technology is changing from generation to generation, 4G will eventually withdraw from the stage of history, and 5G will replace it. Although, compared with Cat.1 and Cat.4, the performance of RedCap is not necessarily better in practical applications, and the cost is higher, but this will not stop the industry from exploring new technologies, allowing 5G to have more new breakthrough.