What is 5G and how it gonna change our daily life?

Zilla Li
InHand Networks
Published in
5 min readMar 30, 2021

This article is meant to bring you speed with what is 5G.

What is the Definition of 5G?

5G is the 5th generation mobile network, and it’s also called IMT-2020 which you may haven’t heard of often.

What are the Key technologies for 5G?

1G realizes analog voice communication, mobile phones can only make phone calls without a screen; 2G realizes digitalization of voice communication, and function computers can send short messages with small screen; 3G realizes multimedia communication of pictures other than voice, and the screen becomes larger to see pictures; 4G realizes local high-speed Internet access, and large screen smart computers can watch short videos, but the signal is good in cities, but poor in hometown. 1G ~ 4G all focus on more convenient and efficient communication between people, while 5G will realize the interconnection of all things at any time, anywhere, so that human beings dare to expect to participate in it synchronously with all things on earth through live broadcast. Let’s see what technologies contributes to 5G.

What is Millimeter Wave (MM Wave)?

Millimeter wave is an electromagnetic wave whose wavelength is in the order of millimeter, and its frequency is about 30ghz ~ 300GHZ. According to the communication principle, the maximum signal bandwidth of wireless communication is about 5% of the carrier frequency, so the higher the carrier frequency is, the greater the signal bandwidth can be achieved. In millimeter wave band, 28GHZ band and 60GHz band are the two most promising bands for 5G. The available spectrum bandwidth of 28GHZ band is 1GHz, while the available signal bandwidth of each channel of 60GHz band is 2GHz (the available spectrum of 9ghz is divided into four channels). In contrast, the highest frequency carrier in 4G-LTE band is about 2GHz, while the available spectrum bandwidth is only 100MHz. Therefore, if the millimeter wave band is used, the spectrum bandwidth can be easily doubled by 10 times, and the transmission rate can be greatly improved. In other words, using millimeter wave band, we can easily watch Blu ray quality movies online with 5G mobile phone, as long as you are not afraid of running out of traffic!

What Is UWB (Ultra Wideband)?

Ultra wideband (UWB) is a wireless technology, which can achieve high-speed data transmission with very low power in a short time. UWB has many unique technical characteristics, and it is a short-range wireless transmission technology with strong competitive advantage. It has strong anti-interference performance, high transmission rate, wide bandwidth, low power consumption, good confidentiality and low transmission power.

How fast is Ultra high speed?

I don’t want to make it too complicated with the terms like MIMO and Full-Duplex. Just to give some data to make you feel how fast it is. The average download rate is about 700mbps, almost ten times faster than 4G!

When downloading music, you can only see “not downloaded” and “completed”;

Watch a super HD movie online, and drag the progress bar casually and it will never pauses.

Ultra low delay

Ultra reliable low delay communication (URLLC) is a special use case of cellular communication, which includes a set of functions suitable for low delay and high reliability applications. It includes key mission applications, such as industrial automation, self driving cars, smart grid, intelligent transportation / freight, and augmented / virtual reality or telemedicine or industrial processes. It is generally believed that 5G will also introduce new paradigms of machine to machine (M2M) communication and massive machine class communication (mmtc), while autonomous systems will control, communicate, measure, store and analyze massive data.

How low is the delay? Intuitively, the response time of 3G is 500ms, that of 4G is 50ms, and that of 5G is less than 0.5ms.

Why 5G is so important?

5G provides an attractive business model for mobile operators and their customers. In order to support these business models, the future network must be able to provide a variety of new services efficiently for different service levels and performance requirements. Operators not only need to provide services for customers in various industries, but also need to commercialize these services quickly and effectively.

What can we do with 5G?

In many application scenarios, the Internet of vehicles is considered to be the most likely place for 5G. The Internet of vehicles scene is also known as “first scene of 5G”. The reason why the Internet of vehicles is a typical scene is that it has high requirements for the communication network. Large bandwidth, extremely low delay, massive number of connections, strict coverage, these are essential conditions for the realization of the Internet of vehicles.

5G is a huge interactive network composed of vehicle location, speed and route information.

With the help of the new generation of information and communication technology, namely 5G, the Internet of vehicles can realize not only the omni-directional network connection of in vehicle, vehicle to vehicle network, vehicle to road, vehicle to person, vehicle to service platform.

However, for the Internet of vehicles, one indicator is that 4G LTE can not fully meet the requirements, that is, delay. In the Internet of vehicles, time delay means life and death. Now the speed of the highway is 120km / h, which is 33m / s. Even if the brake is one second late, there will be a braking distance of more than 40 meters.

The arrival of 5G is also the most critical step for lte-v. as the evolution of LTE, 5G can delay up to 1ms, so LTE will evolve to 5G. In addition to latency, 5G also has many advantages that LTE does not have — it has higher bandwidth, supports a larger number of connections, and supports higher mobile speed.

Let’s take a simple IoV application as an example.

The vehicle gateway connects the vehicular area network to the high-speed 5G cellular network, and provides stable and reliable internet network access for vehicular equipment with various communication interfaces with networking requirements through Gigabit Ethernet interface, wi-fi 5 interface, Bluetooth, RS485 and other interfaces.

The QoS service of vehicle gateway distinguishes different business networking priorities, distinguishes different business bandwidth requirements, scientifically allocates network resources, and achieves optimal business forwarding in various network environments.

It can be said that without 5G, there will be no real Internet of vehicles. Of course, if there is no Internet of vehicles, 5G will lose an important use scenario.

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