5G in 5 minutes
5G is changing the game set, are you ready?
October 7th, 2020
IoT Studio — Globant
Introduction
5G is a new generation of cellular networks and of course is the successor of 4G. The most important difference between the predecessor is not only bandwidth which is up to 10 gigabits per second but its lower latency. Hence having this huge bandwidth 5G technology will affect several corners of the world and not just cell phones competing with traditional internet service providers and shifting industries like IoT and for sure Mobile.
We know 5G will reshape several things out there and the obvious one is how mobile applications will interact with backend and digital assets because if you give more capabilities to developers they will use it and provide improved solutions in terms of user experiences and app functionalities. From an IoT perspective this will be disruptive since more information can be remotely managed due to higher bandwidth and lower latency together with higher sample rates of sensor telemetry. This will move business logic from device to cloud without compromising the response time, also releasing hardware resources for other critical tasks.
Another aspect that will be affected is how the software is built through the different layers. Fog Computing is the extension of Cloud Computing to the Edge and of course it will be affected drastically. But, what is running currently in fog? The answer: applications that need high performance like real time applications for industrial IoT (IIoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications that are event intensive.
- For IIoT the hyper connectivity from a single device helps hardware to send raw events to the cloud having more resources that will produce better results in cost/performance. In this situation the complexity and costs of the hardware will be reduced.
- For AI we can expect that some fog solutions move part of the image or event processing to the cloud, centralising all data there and managing row events, like an image, using GPU sticks at the Edge.
Let’s see some industries and how it will be affected by 5G.
Examples of 5G IoT Applied to Existing Industries
Vehicle to everything (V2X), drone-based applications, augmented reality and virtual reality are some of the solutions that will be immediately affected by high speed connectivity. 5G is not just bandwidth; it’s also about spreading the service everywhere. Real time networks will be accessible by any IoT device and these networks plus the hyperconnected devices will have a deep impact on society changing the industry from an economical point of view around the world fast. Here we have some four examples of industries and how 5G will affect them:
V2X (Connected vehicles)
Connected Vehicles are becoming more and more important in some parts of the world and with this connectivity the vehicles will give to owners more features and accuracy due the increase of the data that the vehicles will send to data centers. Imagine a car that is trying to find parking places real time and sharing this information with another person that is looking for it?
Currently V2X industry is limited by connectivity because it needs real time networking order to provide complex solutions using heavy chunks of data like images and sound. Think about how 5G will affect digital twins solutions, just think about hazardous environments and how we can tele-drive a vehicle or just how a self driving robot can learn quickly from the environment using a mixed edge and cloud approach.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality with 5G
5G will boost massification of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications, not only in marketing and video games industries but also in the manufacturing industry (industrial automation related), in which common use cases are new personal training, plant floor supervision, product assembly guidance and machinery supervision/maintenance.
High speed connections will enable the exchange of data sources to overlap digital content over real image feed from cameras such as 3D CAD (Computer Assisted Design) content, with real time data from digital twins like industrial controllers or IoT devices and other data sources like production databases and business applications (ERP, CRM, etc).
Hybrid networks for connected everything
The evolution of hybrid networks implementations due to the capacity of high volumes of data exchange in which using a 5G connection in every node won’t make solutions cost effective (Hardware + network traffic cost). The scenarios for these types of implementations will be LPWA+5G, industrial networks+5G, mesh networks+5G and WiFi+5G.
In all these, 5G will play a gateway role for a high number of devices connected to applications and platforms to increase the type of content exchanged (raw data, files, images, video streaming, audio, etc). This is a wide spectrum of use cases: smart farming, connected enterprise/digital plant, connected home, smart buildings and smart cities, among others.
IoT Platforms + 5G
The possibility of near real time processing would increase the number of scenarios in which edge processing could be migrated to IoT platforms, enabling the growth of digital twins adoption as well as all offerings from the IoT platforms for devices management, IoT data storage and visualisation, services integration, augmented reality integration and data analytics taking advantages of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning within the cloud for IoT devices data.
Conclusion
5G will help to explore the full IoT potential, increasing the projections figures on how many devices are going to be connected to the Internet and its economic impact across different industries. As we’ve mentioned, 5G will be an enabler for some technologies to arise such as Connected Vehicles (V2X) or Augmented Reality and for others it will simply help them flourish.
This impact will also be reflected in other domains such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and these three spaces (IoT, Big Data and AI) will demand changes in data centers and cloud services faster than ever before.
References
A case study on 4G to 5G differences
Qualcomm teams up with The New Yorker to explain 5G and its impact on VR, IoT, and AI
Edge Computing Terminology vs Fog Computing Terminology vs Cloud Computing Terminology
GPU sticks
v2x Vehicle to Everything
IIoT
Augmented Reality vs Virtual Reality
Artificial Intelligence
Digital twins Terminology
ERP, CRM
Industrial networks and mesh networks
