IMT for 2020 and beyond is envisaged to expand and support diverse usage scenarios and applications that will continue beyond the current IMT. Furthermore, a broad variety of capabilities would be tightly coupled with these intended different usage scenarios and applications for IMT for 2020 and beyond. The usage scenarios for IMT for 2020 and beyond include:
Enhanced Mobile Broadband: Mobile Broadband addresses the human-centric use cases for access to multi-media content, services and data. The demand for mobile broadband will continue to increase, leading to enhanced Mobile Broadband. The enhanced Mobile Broadband usage scenario will come with new application areas and requirements in addition to existing Mobile Broadband applications for improved performance and an increasingly seamless user experience. This usage scenario covers a range of cases, including wide-area coverage and hotspot, which have different requirements. For the hotspot case, i.e. for an area with high user density, very high traffic capacity is needed, while the requirement for mobility is low and user data rate is higher than that of wide area coverage. For the wide area coverage case, seamless coverage and medium to high mobility are desired, with much improved user data rate compared to existing data rates. However the data rate requirement may be relaxed compared to hotspot.
Ultra-reliable and low latency communications: This use case has stringent requirements for capabilities such as throughput, latency and availability. Some examples include wireless control of industrial manufacturing or production processes, remote medical surgery, distribution automation in a smart grid, transportation safety, etc.
Massive machine type communications: This use case is characterized by a very large number of connected devices typically transmitting a relatively low volume of non-delay sensitive data. Devices are required to be low cost, and have a very long battery life.
Additional use cases are expected to emerge, which are currently not foreseen. For future IMT, flexibility will be necessary to adapt to new use cases that come with a wide range of requirements.
Future IMT systems will encompass a large number of different features. Depending on the circumstances and the different needs in different countries, future IMT systems should be designed in a highly modular manner so that not all features have to be implemented in all networks.
