This workshop is the 3rd edition (former ULTRA2 workshop) after successful occurrences at Globecom 2014 and Globecom 2015.

Future wireless communications will support countless emerging use cases and applications with a high variability of their performance attributes. Beyond content distribution, where typically throughput per area is the most relevant KPI, we will see more and more applications where the system capacity may not be the critical point, but they rather have stringent latency and/or reliability requirements. In this regard, ITU-R finalized in September 2015 its vision for IMT for 2020 and beyond, which envisages to expand and support diverse families of usage scenarios and applications, including Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC). Also the standardization work in 3GPP to support the IMT-2020 requirements in 5G including the URLLC use case has started. Some of the new applications will demand an end-to-end latency of a few milliseconds, while fields such as wireless automation and control may in addition require reliabilities in terms of block error rates on the order of 10-9.

Examples for such applications are user-specific 3D video rendering and augmented reality, remote control (e.g. remote robotics, surgery, tactile internet etc.), wireless automation of production facilities, vehicular traffic efficiency and safety, mobile gaming, etc.

Effectively, many future applications will demand an end-to-end latency of a few ms, while fields such as wireless automation and control may in addition require reliabilities in terms of block error rates on the order of 10-9. Optimizing wireless communications for latency and reliability requires a complete paradigm change in wireless systems design, and has to be reflected in various technology fields, such as air interface design, signal processing on both the device and infrastructure side, network infrastructure and architecture considerations, control / user plane design, session management and protocol stack design. The workshop provides a platform for technical experts from the radio, core network and application side to elaborate on latency and reliability requirements of future applications or provide solutions to significantly reduce end-to-end latency and/or increase reliability in wireless communications systems.