5G The enabling technology in the coming years.
The current generation of mobile networks continues to transform the way people communicate and access to information. The development and implementation of technologies that allow true networks focused on the connection of human beings and machines, will redefine the mobility of the end user along with the whole panorama of the global telecommunications industry. The ecosystem of the mobile industry is focused on making the 5G vision a reality and is working together on many fronts to invent the next generation of mobile experiences.
5G aims to effectively connect virtually everything from simple sensors to complex robots, all while improving even more traditional mobile broadband service. This means that the next generation of applications, services and use cases will have an extreme variation in the requirements. To meet this challenge, 5G will require a new user-centered design that can scale and adapt to billions of connected things, provide new ways to connect everything and improve cost and energy efficiency. This user-centered design approach represents a new way of thinking about networks and devices. From the perspective of connectivity, users will no longer be mere endpoints, they will be an integral part of the network and will create “borderless” connectivity. But it is not only the connectivity pursued by 5G, but also the computer and content must be distributed closer to the real user, be it human, vehicle, machine or “thing”.
5G networks will be the enabling technology for the creation of new services, new business models and support for the efficient and profitable launching of a multitude of services, designed for different vertical markets that have service and security requirements that involve many stakeholders. 5G is envisioned to be a unified platform for all types of spectrum and bands, from low bands below 1 GHz to emerging higher bands like mmWave, supporting a wide range of new kinds of services, while offering an opportunity for a new deployment, subscription, charging and business models. A key enabler is a unified air interface design that is scalable and adaptable across all these spectrum and service types.
5G wireless will support a heterogeneous set of integrated air interfaces: from evolutions of current access schemes to brand new technologies. 5G networks will encompass cellular and satellite solutions. Seamless handover between heterogeneous wireless access technologies will be a native feature of 5G, as well as the use of simultaneous radio access technologies to increase reliability and availability. The deployment of ultra-dense networks with numerous small cells will require new interference mitigation, backhauling and installation techniques. It is expected that 5G access networks for some services will require very wide contiguous carrier bandwidths (e.g. hundreds of MHz up to several GHz) to be provided at a very high overall system capacity. To support the requirements for wide contiguous bandwidths, higher carrier frequencies above 6 GHz need to be considered. The consideration of any new bands for such services will require careful assessment and recognition of other services using, or planning to use these bands.
Maintaining a stable and predictable regulatory and spectrum management environment is critical for long-term investments. Research on this spectrum has to take into account long-term investments so that they can be preserved. The exclusive mobile licensed spectrum assignment methods will remain important even if new techniques may be envisaged to improve spectrum utilization under some circumstances. 5G will be driven by software. Network functions are expected to run over a unified operating system in a number of points of presence, especially at the edge of the network for meeting performance targets. As a result, it will heavily rely on emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Fog Computing (FC) to achieve the required performance, scalability and agility.
5G will ease and optimize network management operations. The development of cognitive features as well as the advanced automation of operation through proper algorithms will allow optimizing complex business objectives, such as end-to-end energy consumption. In addition, the exploitation of Data Analytics and Big Data techniques will pave the way to monitor the users Quality of Experience through new metrics combining network and behavioral data while guaranteeing privacy.
Key technology concepts are network slicing and network softwarization, including network function virtualization and software-defined networking. The presented security architecture builds upon concepts from the 3G and 4G security architectures but extends and enhances them to cover the new 5G environment. It comprises a toolbox for security relevant modeling of the systems, a set of security design principles, and a set of security functions and mechanisms to implement the security controls needed to achieve stated security objectives.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) provide examples for possible new design principles to allow more flexibility and tighter integration with infrastructure layers, although performance and scalability need further investigation. Both approaches stem from the IT realm: NFV leverages recent advances in server virtualization and enterprise IT virtualization; SDN proposes logical centralization of control functions and relies on advances in server scale out and cloud technologies. However, none of those is essentially a networking technology, as the network is assumed to be there before NFV or SDN can be even used. Hence, 5G will provide a unified control for multi-tenant networks and services through functional architectures deployment across many operators’ frameworks, giving service providers, and ultimately prosumers, the perception of a convergence across many underlying wireless, optical, network and media technologies. 5G will make possible the fundamental shift in paradigm from the current “service provisioning through controlled ownership of infrastructures” to a “unified control framework through virtualization and programmability of multi-tenant networks and services”.
To achieve these goals, developments in 5G will primarily focus on three fundamental aspects:
• Capabilities for supporting massive capacity and massive connectivity
• Support for an increasingly diverse set of services, application and users –all with extremely diverging requirements for work and life.
Other than flexible and efficient use of all available non-contiguous spectrum in different network deployment scenarios, freeing up additional spectrum will also be required to support thousand-fold capacity increases by 2020 — and even higher increases looking forward to 2040 and beyond.
But while a global consensus is forming that 500 MHz to 1GHz bandwidth of additional mobile spectrum is needed, the following considerations will need
to be addressed:
• Spectrum bands availability by region and the local laws that govern their usage will need to be harmonized so the global circulation and economies-of-scale for mobile devices are not negatively impacted.
• Exactly how all available and new IMT bands will be used to achieve 10 Gb/s for an individual end user is a major challenge for designing working 5G systems.
To sufficiently maximize spectrum efficiency, all-spectrum access and programmable air interface technologies will need to be capable of mapping service requirements to the best suitable combinations of frequency and radio resources. The continuing deep integration of SDN and cloud architecture technologies will help realize this, and will facilitate the on-demand customization of mobile network technologies that better ensure QoS.
The start of commercial deployment of 5G systems is expected in years 2020+. Japan has committed to have a commercial system for the 2020 Olympics. It is too early for the European operators to commit to network
rollouts but many are predicting the 5G commercial availability in 2020–2025. The path from 5G exploration to early deployment from the today’s perspective in 5G PPP is summarized in the following table:
