The fifth generation mobile communications (5G) systems will need to support the ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) to enable future mission-critical applications, e.g., self-driving cars and remote control. With the aim of verifying the feasibility of URLLC related 5G requirements in real environments, field trials of URLLC using a new frame structure are conducted in Yokohama, Japan. In this paper, we present the trial results and investigate the impact of the new frame structure and retransmission method on the URLLC performance. To reduce the user-plane latency and improve the packet success probability, a wider subcarrier spacing, self-contained frame structure, and acknowledgement/negative acknowledgement-less (ACK/NACK-less) retransmission are adopted. We verify the feasibility of URLLC in actual field tests using our prototype test-bed while implementing these techniques. The results show that for the packet size of 32 bytes the URLLC related requirements defined by the 3GPP are satisfied even at low signal-to-noise ratios or at non-line-of-sight transmission.

In this letter we investigate the relaying strategies for multihop transmission in wireless networks over Rayleigh fading channels. Theoretical analysis reveals that equally allocating power among all transmitters and placing relays equidistantly on the line between source and destination are optimal in terms of outage capacity. Then equal time duration for the transmission of each hop is also proved to be optimal. Furthermore, the optimum number of hops is also derived and shown to be inversely proportional to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Numerical simulations agree well with the reported theoretical results.

A novel dynamic element matching (DEM) method, called binary-tree random DEM (BTR-DEM), is presented for a Nyquist-rate current-steering digital-to-analog converter (DAC). By increasing or decreasing the number of unit current sources randomly at the same time, the BTR-DEM encoding reduces switch transition glitches. A 5-bit current-steering DAC with the BTR-DEM technique is implemented in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The measured spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) attains 42 dB for a sample rate of 100 MHz and shows little dependence on signal frequency.

The influence of the splitter plates on the high-current arc roots formation in low voltage circuit breaker is investigated. One arc quenching chamber model is designed, where the shape of the splitter plates can be changed. The capacitor bank circuit is used to provide the test power supply, and the effective value of the prospective short circuit current is fixed to 10kA. High speed CCD camera is adopted to record the arc images during the arcing duration. Arc current and voltage are also measured to analyze the arc characteristics. In addition, a simplified 1-D thermal-electric model is developed to investigate the influence of the splitter plates on the distribution of the current density of the arc plasma with the assumption of local thermal equilibrium (LTE). It shows that the distance between the arc initial ignition location and the splitter plates is crucial to the arc root formation.

With measuring the arc current, arc voltage and arc images, the high-current air arc commutation process across the separated electrodes was investigated. It shows that the existence of a short stable arc in the gap may increase the current commutation time. According to the energy balance of the arc column, the conditions to maintain the short stable arc were introduced and the effects of the current limiting resistance on the current commutation process were discussed.

For unitary space-time code (USTC), the impact of spatial correlation on error performance is investigated. A tighter and simpler upper bound is derived for generalized likelihood ratio test decoder. We establish that the spatial correlation does not change the diversity gain, whereas it degrades the error performance of USTC. Motivated by the precoding of space-time block code, we designed a precoder for USTC to handle the case of the joint transmit-receive correlation. Numerical results show that the degradation in performance due to spatial correlation can be considerably compensated by the proposed algorithm.

A novel retransmission scheme, considering both transmission rate and frame error rate, is proposed to alleviate the inefficiencies caused by head-of-line blocking and null padding problems during retransmission in IEEE 802.11be synchronous multi-link wireless local area networks. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves throughput by up to 200% over the legacy scheme by reallocating lost subframes and adding effective duplicate subframes to multiple links.

This paper presents results of outdoor experiments conducted in the 39-GHz band. In particular, assuming mobile communications such as the fifth generation mobile communications (5G) and beyond, we focus on achieving 1Gbit/s or greater throughput at transmission distances exceeding 1km in the experiments. In order to enhance the data rate and capacity, the use of higher frequency bands above 6GHz for mobile communications is a new and important technical challenge for 5G and beyond. To extend further the benefits of higher frequency bands to various scenarios, it is important to enable higher frequency bands to basically match the coverage levels of existing low frequency bands. Moreover, mobility is important in mobile communications. Therefore, we assume the 39-GHz band as a candidate frequency for 5G and beyond and prepare experimental equipment that utilizes lens antenna and beam tracking technologies. In the experiments, we achieve the throughput values of 2.14Gbit/s at the transmission distance of 1850m and 1.58Gbit/s at 20-km/h mobility. Furthermore, we show the possibility of achieving high throughput even under non-line-of-sight conditions. These experimental results contribute to clarifying the potential for the 39-GHz band to support gigabit-per-second class data rates while still providing coverage and supporting mobility over a coverage area with distance greater than 1km.