5G — Traffic Demands & Business in the Digital Society of 2020 : Part I

Marco Giordani, Ph.D. Candidate in Information Engineering at University of Padova & Inven Trust had a tete-a-tete on the 5G paradigm. Here’s the first post on what came out of it.

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the 5th generation (5G) of cellular networks is positioned to address the traffic demands and business context of the digital society beyond 2020.

5G will not simply be an evolution of earlier cellular standards, like 4G/LTE and its predecessors. On the contrary, 5G will foster the 4th industrial revolution by supporting, besides enhanced mobile broadband and massive machine-type communications, new use cases with unprecedented stringent demands in terms of very high throughput (1 Gbps or more), to support ultra-high definition video streaming and virtual reality applications; very low latency (even less than 1 ms in some cases), to support real-time remote machine control (e.g., remote surgery); ultra-high reliability, to support fully autonomous connected and intelligent transportation systems; low energy consumption, to accelerate the adoption of solutions for smart cities; ultra-high connectivity resilience and robustness, a prerequisite to support advanced safety applications and public safety in dangerous or inaccessible areas.

This wide diversity of technology drivers and use cases is a unique characteristic of the 5G paradigm, whose potential will be fully unleashed only through cornerstone innovations, breakthrough technological advancements and novel network designs. In particular, 5G encompasses new architecture developments to boost wireless capacity through (i) new frequency bands (e.g., the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum up to 100 GHz), (ii) advanced spectrum usage and management, (iii) new techniques such as massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), (iv) seamless integration of licensed and unlicensed bands, and (v) a new core network design (i.e., 5G Core (5GC)) offering network slicing and virtualisation.

In this post series we will go through the details of the key innovations and novel design options that will match the 5G performance requirements.