The 5G Standard Essential Patent (SEP) Declaration efforts are ongoing as companies around the globe are vying for position in the 5G IP game. The standard looks to define the patents necessary to implement 5G technology into the market to organize future licensing arrangements and portfolio evaluations. The declaration process is being overseen by 3GPP, a partnership of seven different telecommunications standard development organizations.[1]
The 5G SEP efforts focus on innovations lowering latency, increasing reliability, and providing efficient, low cost coverage to support baseband and radio technologies exceeding 6GHz. Previous connectivity in 4G technologies used sub-6GHz wavelengths, overlapped with existing radio access networks. The shift from 4G to 5G above that threshold requires a massive leap in performance and energy efficiency, and a heavy investment in infrastructure to support the new network.
The investments made in 5G center around enabling the necessary technology to advance beyond 4G and mobile devices and move to 5G which aims to integrate a wide variety of everyday items and the internet of things.[2] There are a significant number of subcategories/element technologies necessary to achieve this goal:
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- NOMA
- Massive MIMO
- Separation of C plane and U plane
- URLCC implementation
- Network slicing / NFV
- 5G reference signal
- Millimeter wave band
- Signal waveform
- Unlicensed band usage
- Initial access
- mMTC/IoT
- D2D/V2X
- Frame structure
- Data flow aggregation for multiple connectivity
- Flexible duplex
The 5G SEP Declaration process is likely to continue until the mid 2020’s, with over 300,000 declared patents thus far. [3] Of this pool, several companies have made substantial contributions to the total.[4] This includes major global companies like Huawei (17.1%), Ericsson (14.7%), Samsung (13.1%), Qualcomm (11.7%), and Nokia (10.2%), among others. How each continues to develop 5G SEP technology will play a significant part in their ability to leverage the 5G SEP landscape moving forward.
[1] https://www.3gpp.org/about-3gpp/partners
[2] https://www.cybersoken.com/file/5G-SEP-ENG.pdf
[3] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e1dc4072-1695-4279-b7fa-3fe3e19982b8
[4] https://www.twobirds.com/~/media/pdfs/news/articles/2019/determining-which-companies-are-leading-the-5g-race.pdf?la=en&hash=8ABA5A7173EEE8FFA612E070C0EA4B4F53CC50DE
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