Changing the rules of the game with 5G
Infinity Display, Face ID, NPU (Neural Processing Unit). 2017 has been a revolutionary year for smartphones’ market compared to 2016. Anyway, there’s innovative technology most of developers and researchers is working on and it’s 5G.
What does “changing the rules of the game” mean? From 2019/2020, when first commercial applications built on 5G will be released, our usage of smartphones, cars and every single device connected to a network will be revolutionized.
5G — ACRONYM, HISTORY & STANDARDS
5G means “Fifth Generation” infrastructure, referring to every digital technology used by cellular (or mobile) network. At the beginning 5G was a project developed by NASA and M2Mi (Machine-to-Machine Intelligence) Corp in 2008 and since then other projects have started and first results, despite skepticism, were shown on December 21st, 2017. In fact, at 3GPP TSG RAN plenary session in Lisbon (Portugal) it was approved the first 5G standard: 5G NR Nsa (5G New-Radio Non-Standalone operation). It’s important to show that 5G researches were pursued by both private companies like Huawei, Ericsson and Samsung, public institutions like EU (50mln € invested, several parallel projects like METIS I and METIS II, 5GrEEn, TCI FP7 with i-JOIN and Xhaul in partnership with IMDEA Networks Institute, CROWD, 5 NORMA, mmMAGIC, SUPERFLUIDITY), Rutgers University, Surrey University and governments of Sri Lanka, China and South Korea.
5G — FEATURES
There’re 4 features that make 5G so special:
· Speed
If 4G theoretical data rate is 75 Mbps is expected that 5G could take a rate a hundred times bigger: it means that 5G will work from 100 Mbps to 10 (or 20) Gbps. Anyway, we realize every day that 4G’s real data rate is 5–8 Mbps. 5G is still in an experimental step but, for example, Samsung announced in October 2014 that their 28 GHz network reached an outstanding speed of 7.8 Gbps.
· Scalability
What’s revolutionary is the fact that 5G will be the first generation that was built focusing on scalibility than speed in order to realize networks with a smaller latency (from example from 10–20 ms of 4G networks to just 1 ms). This will mean also extending connection to that billions of people that have no access to 3G or 4G. This will be possible because 5G will extend the band-width used by today technology to extremely high frequency: it means radio waves between 30 and 300 GHz. So we’re going to break the 24 GHz limit that nowadays implies small waves that could not be used for long-distance connections.
· Low Cost Networks
The combination between speed and long-distance throughput will permit to designers to abandon the use of optic fiber wires to connect distant cells. It will be possible, instead, to connect each cell to 5G network. This is a strategy that reduces costs and will extend network coverage. In addition, this will lead to an increment of connection density up to 1 million of devices connected in a km2.
· Reliability
This is a strong requirement for 5G and it depends on the use case. Researchers agree that 5G will be 99.999 percent reliable meaning that the probability of outages for applications that will exploit 5G capabilities, like remote surgery and examination or smart grid’s teleprotection, will be less than 1 percent.
5G — NEW POSSIBILITIES
So, what are the applications that we’re going to enjoy in the next 5–7 years?
Considering 5G networks’ speed it will possible to download a 2-hour movie in less than 20 seconds. This will probably lead more people to subscribe contracts with streaming companies like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. That’s why theoretically 5G networks will support up to 36 terabytes of data per month for every user. In addition, cars will be more and more smart. Their parts (e.g. electric control unit and front cameras for pedestrian detection) in the future could be connected wirelessly but most important 5G will permit to create local networks between moving cars. This is a great starting point that will lead to autonomous drive because, for example, collision-avoidance radars will be safer and more reliable. Moreover, little cells or antennas could be mounted on roadsides or road markers giving more information to our cars, in fact in a recent test by Samsung a stable 5G data stream of 1.2 Gbps was transmitted to a car moving at 97 km/h. Then, our homes will become finally smart: every device (from your smartphone to your fridge) will be networked and will work needing not a huge band-width and in a (not so) remote future the internal components of your computer could be placed in different part of the house and connected to a local network. Other applications that are going to benefit implementation of 5G networks are remote surgery and examination (more precision and reactivity to controls exploiting low latency), video broadcasting and smart grid’s cities.
But how all this will be implemented?
Fist of all we must distinguish three different kind of services that are based on wireless connections:
· mMTC (massive Machine Type Communication) = it implies high density of devices connected in a small geographical area. This service requires devices with long-life batteries and a wide coverage and implies an elevate number of control messages sent through devices. As a consequence, latency and band-width aren’t key requirements.
· URLLC (Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication) = it implies that one device (in this case usually robots, drones, vehicles) need a connection with low latency (<5 ms), high reliability and security.
· eMBB (enhanced Mobile BroadBand) = the goal in this case is to grant mobile accesses to ultrabroadband. This means a focus on peak speed per user and the possibility of managing a huge amount of data per user.
Then we must know that new networks, based on 5G technology, will first permit to create SDNs (Software Defined Network) in which control plane and user plane will be separated making services more efficient. This is fundamental for each kind of service (mMTC, URLLC, eMBB) especially for URLLC services because more efficiency means lower latency. Other fundamental approaches of 5G are NFV (Network Function Virtualization) in which some network’s functions don’t run on dedicated hardware but on software’s parts that can be executed by standard servers supporting network virtualization, and SON (Self Organizing Network) that grants an automatic and flexible management of radio access networks. The last approach is Network Slicing: a single physical network will be subdivided into several virtual networks or “slices”.
How much time does 5G needs before becoming a commercial and common technology?
There’re plans from Huawei and MegaFon (Russian company) to introduce 5G networks for the up-coming Fifa World Cup that is going to be held in Russia in June 2018. Anyway, this is going to be just a demo project. More realistically the first 5G network will be ready for 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The first step was made in Lisbon 10 days ago. More steps are going to be made, but rules are already changing.
