Well, we are currently living in the world of 4G LTE mobile devices and starting to see what true connectivity means when we are snap-chatting live videos from a huge concert and, “Ugh,” we are seeing that the snapchat video upload failed as the cellular network connectivity is slow and is being used by 1000s of people, and we are becoming impatient and keep trying again, and finally, ‘Voila!’, the video is posted and we are happy :). We keep doing this throughout the concert and fail a lot of times.
Now imagine a world where everyone is hooked onto their VR/AR headsets and submerged in the concerts(iHeart Radio Fest, EDC,..) / Live games (Super Bowl, World cup, Olympics,..) with 100s of 1000s of people, utilizing highly immersive technologies at the same time. Do you think it can be possible with the existing networks? The answer may be no, unfortunately.
Well, the good news is 5G is coming to save the ass for the above scenarios and many other important use-cases in healthcare, connectivity, porn(are you kidding me?) and more importantly many innovations that are yet to be discovered. The possibilities seems endless and it would take many enlightened souls to envision well beyond in future, as to what it has to offer.
The below notes are a quick start for 5G understood naively.
What is 5G
It stands for 5th generation mobile networks or 5th generation wireless systems. Efficiency and security will be of paramount importance. In brief, the next generation or 5G networks are dominated to serve up on below:
OFDM + Enhancement of mobile broadband + Mission critical service + Massive Internet of Things
Now we will expand these terms briefly w.r.t 5G:
OFDM is orthogonal frequency divison multiplexing and concerns basically as to how data is encoded and used in wideband digital communication in wireless networks. There may be newer mechanisms to optimize the techniques and used for 5G
Enhancement of mobile broadband with 5G will ensure that we get high data rates ~>= 10 Gbps
Mission critical services are the ones which require low latency, high speed and extremely high reliability. Consider one such use case of doctors performing emergency surgeries through remote data centers and applications which need extremely high reliability and low latency. Ultra reliability is one big requirement in such applications. 5G is coming to help such use cases.
Massive Internet of Things are connected devices in a very small region and comprising 100s of 1000s of them. Cisco already predicts billions of IoT devices by 2020 surrounding you. You can imagine what it will take to support such devices in a high density small region in terms of security, efficiency and always connected state. The current control plane is not adequate to support 10 billion+ connected IoT devices by 2020. 10,000x more traffic is expected to grow than what it is now. 5G is coming to help on such use cases.
What is the vision of 5G
For all users, cars, IoT , IoE; finally interconnecting their worlds — that may be the next 30 years plan.
- Connectivity and compute will be the major drive.
- 5G — NR(New Radio) Spec is expected to be completed by 2018
What are the categories for 5G
- 5G high speed , low latency NR sub-6 Ghz
- 5G mobilizing mmWave 28Ghz
Why would Data sciences/Healthcare need 5G?
Our body generates massive data, if collected. Each and every person has genomics data. This data is collected by many health organizations. They use genomics data transfer and analyze that data in real time. “Human body as a source of data” — many health companies own a large portion of collecting that info.
Research labs and pharma companies, hospitals need this data for research and many other different purposes. In the near distant future this data grows more and more and needs more real time analysis on the go and transfers need to be done with high reliability, low latency.
Some interesting use cases that are starting to exist in healthcare:
- Portable ultrasounds — Philips health is generating a petabytes of data per month.
- Apple healthKit — aggregate data from wearable devices
- Hospital at home — high reliability of all connected monitoring devices
In the new world, you will take control of your health data — and decide who you share that data with. This is where 5G will help in securing those scenarios which need high reliability, high bandwidth applications.
In the new world of monitoring health data the question comes: “Will doctors prescribe the app? or will apps prescribe the doctor?”
Miscellaneous use cases for 5G
- asset tracking on cheap IoE device — We need to have exact precision of where the device is at any time utilizing cheapest resources.
- minimal number of transactions for IoT device to come up and send message and go back to sleep — massive IoE
- car to car connection , device to device direct communication
In the end, or the beginning, there are many things and scenarios yet to be discovered. Forward compability of 5G intermixed with our wild imagination and creativity will take us there. Let us dream more..
The world of Virtual reality, Augmented reality and AI and much more is coming and will be merging immersively with 5G. I would love to hear from your wild imagination as to what you will build as an app/platform developer with 5G on the go?
Qualcomm along with others is making significant push on 5G: Read more
Note: I am a current Qualcomm employee and these views are my own.
