A Quick Tour Around 5G — A Wireless Innovation

Yoshitha Chowdary
Flowchain Knowledge Camp
4 min readDec 23, 2019

It is always vital to consider both the pros and cons of technology and utilize it accordingly. This article talks about the advantages, drawbacks, and challenges of the latest most hearing innovation “5G”.

ADVANTAGES :

5G offers a wide range of benefits to many individuals and also to numerous sectors. A few critical benefits are as follows.

  1. This technology offers a possibility to provide uniform, uninterrupted, and consistent connectivity across the world.
  2. 5G can gather all networks onto one platform.
  3. It is considered to be more productive and efficient than previous networks.
  4. It can facilitate the subscribed supervision tool for quick action.
  5. It is easily manageable with the previous generations.
  6. It will provide essential broadcasting data, i.e., in gigabit, which will support more than 60,000 connections.
  7. It supports high resolution and bi-directional large bandwidth shaping.
  8. Education will become more accessible — A student can attend classes from anywhere in the world.
  9. Medical treatments will become more accessible — It helps a doctor to treat the patient located in a remote part of the world.
  10. Visualizing the universe, galaxies, and planets will be possible.
  11. It is possible to detect natural disasters faster like a tsunami, earthquakes, etc.

DISADVANTAGES :

Although 5G innovation is researched and conceptualized to solve all radio signal issues and hardship of versatile world, it has the following shortcomings.

  1. Technology is still under process, and research on its viability is going on.
  2. Many of the old devices would not be competent to 5G; hence, all of them need to be replaced with a new one — which is an expensive deal.
  3. Developing an infrastructure requires a high investment.
  4. Security and privacy issues are yet to be solved.

CHALLENGES :

Challenges are the inherent part of the new development; 5G also has enormous problems to resolve. As we see past, i.e., the development of radio technology, we discover rapid growth. Beginning from 1G to 5G, the journey is only approximately 40 years old (Considering 1G in the 1980s and 5G in 2020s). In any case, in this journey, the common challenges observed are lack of infrastructure, research strategy, and high cost.

The challenges of 5G can be categorized into two headings,

  • Technological Challenges
  • Common Challenges

Technological Challenges :

5G Technical Challenges
  1. Inter-cell Interference: This is one of the significant technical issues that must be solved. There are variations in the size of traditional macro cells and concurrent small cells that will lead to interference.
  2. Efficient Medium Access Control: In a condition of the massive deployment of access points and user terminals, the user throughput will be low, latency will be high, and hotspots will not be competent to cellular technology to provide high performance. Sufficient research to optimize technology is necessary.
  3. Traffic Management: In comparison to the traditional human to human traffic in cellular networks, a significant number of Machine to Machine (M2M) devices in a cell may cause serious system challenges, i.e., radio access network (RAN) challenges, which will cause overloading and congestion.

Common Challenges:

5G Common Challenges
  1. Multiple Services: Unlike other radio signal services, 5G offers services to heterogeneous networks, technologies, and devices operating in different geographic regions. Thus, the challenge is of standardization to provide dynamic, universal, user-centric, and data-rich wireless services to fulfill the high expectation of people.
  2. InfrastructureStandardization, and application of 5G services are the challenges that researchers are facing.
  3. Communication, Navigation, and SensingThese services generally depend upon the accessibility of radio spectrum, through which signals are transmitted. Although 5G innovation incorporates a stable computational power to handle the vast volume of data coming from diverse and distinct sources, it needs more prominent infrastructure support.
  4. Security and PrivacyThis is one of the foremost imperative challenges, where 5G must guarantee the security of personal data. 5G will have to characterize the instabilities related to security dangers, including trust, privacy, cybersecurity, which are expanding over the globe.
  5. Legislation of Cyberlaw Cybercrime and other extortion may also increment with the high speed and ubiquitous 5G innovation. Hence, the legislation of the Cyberlaw is also a crucial issue, which generally is administrative and political.

However, a few talks are going on around the world among technologists, analysts, merchants, and government about the developments, executions, viability, and security concerns related to 5G.

26/11/2019

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