ENENSYS Technologies, through its subsidiary ENENSYS Expway, is glad to be part of the 5G-Tours H2020 project and bring its expertise in a mobile broadcast to implement 5G-based use-cases targeting large audiences.

With the participation of ENENSYS Expway, the 5G-Xcast H2020 project has paved the way towards the use of 5G broadcast and multicast. It has designed, implemented, and evaluated a new 5G network architecture for media delivery over a point to multipoint transmissions, targeting the 4G limitations and the new key capabilities of 5G. In 5G-Tours, ENENSYS Technologies will leverage the solutions from 5G-Xcast European Project.

3GPP envisions two different modes for point to multipoint transmissions. The first, based on 4G MBMS capabilities, is the terrestrial broadcast mode, allowing in particular High Power High Tower (HPHT) use cases for rooftop or mobile reception through possibly a dedicated radio frequency band, which has been recently achieved in 3GPP release 16 under the name of 5G Broadcast. The second, called mixed mode, is targeted in 3GPP release 17 and will be applicable to all verticals. Both modes will be showcased in the 5G-Tour Turin node. ENENSYS Technologies will participate in these use case implementations by providing the products and solutions in both core network and terminal.

Key radio and service aspects of the upcoming mixed mode are being discussed at 3GPP. In the context of 5G-Tours, ENENSYS Technologies increases its standard exposure, and actively participates in several 3GPP groups. ENENSYS is particularly focused on the multicast service layer (i.e; the delivery protocol stack, the service discovery procedures, and additional procedures for loss repairing, QoS, and consumption reporting). This layer could be located in an external application server, specified by the 3GPP SA4 working group, out of the 5G core. This service layer could converge with a fixed broadband multicast solution as DVB-MABR, which is also the reason for ENENSYS parallel involvement at DVB.

Within 5G-Tours, ENENSYS will also help coordinating the design and the development of a dedicated service layer for the verticals, to facilitate the network orchestration and the provisioning of customized network slices required for the deployment of the numerous and very heterogeneous use cases proposed in this project.

ENENSYS Technologies plans to use the results of the 5G-TOURS project to enrich its portfolio and to offer improved products to the broadcast market, by offering 5G broadcast technologies and solutions for the use cases targeted in the project and beyond; but also by bringing broadcast mode as a part of standard specifications in the upcoming 3GPP releases.