5G REDCAP (REDUCED CAPABILITY) FOR SMART CITY ECOSYSTEM

Creating a smart city requires building smart infrastructure, including Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) networks to manage traffic and improve road safety.Achieving this means large-scale sensor deployment, while making it sustainable poses major hardware challenges.Existing networks, such as low-power wide-area networks (NB-IoT), are too slow for real-time alerts.While full 5G eMBB modems are fast, they are economically not viable due to their hardware complexity and power consumption.To achieve an optimal solution that offers moderate speed and low hardware complexity, we aim to study 5G reduced capability (RedCap), introduced in 3GPP Release 17 and further improved in Release 18, also known as eRedCap.We survey reduced channel bandwidths to 20 MHz or 5 MHz, lowered antenna counts to 1Rx or 2Rx, and extended Discontinuous Reception (eDRX) sleep modes, and their implications for V2I networks.RedCap sacrifices gigabit speeds and ultra-low latency but consistently meets the 50-100 ms latency to successfully handle Basic Safety Messages (BSM) and IoT traffic that V2I applications require.This trade-off makes wireless, solar-powered city infrastructure a practical option.