5G wireless networks will support thousandfold gains in capacity, connections for at least 100 billion devices, and a 10Gbps individual user experience capable of extremely low latency and response time. Deployment of these networks will emerge between 2020 and 2030. Breakthroughs in wireless network innovation will also drive economic and societal growth in entirely new ways, through networks capable of zero-distance connectivity between people and connected machines.
Editor: Jason jason.patterson@huawei.com
The next wave
The advent of 5G technologies and ICT networks pave the way for digital society. Right now, all over the world, mobile access to the Internet is becoming entirely fundamental to doing business in all industries. Flexible working practices facilitated by mobile networks and devices are already essential, and are allowing enterprises to conduct operations across boundaries that previously inhibited growth.
Growing mobile access to the Internet, cloud-based services, and big data analytics are allowing anyone,anywhere to leverage “big wisdom” – a whole new kind of globally connected & shared knowledge base. The continuing rise in the relevance of social media as an important part of how we interact with the Internet is also opening up new kinds of intelligent analytics, ready to be harnessed for tangible business & everyday-life benefits. Transformation and convergence of ICT network infrastructure is also driving business innovation and growth.Not only is ICT an increasingly effective tool for enhancing efficiency, but it is now a vital driver of social and economic growth.
The development of 5G technologies is a cornerstone for realizing breakthroughs in the transformation of ICT network infrastructure. Ultra-broadband and intelligentpipe network features that achieve near-instantaneous, zero-distance connectivity between people and connected machines, no matter where they are, are just the first step.
A changing telco landscape
The current generation of mobile networks continues to transform the way people communicate and access information. Further development and implementation of technologies that enable true human-centric and machinecentric networks will come to redefine end-user mobility, along with the entire landscape of the global telco industry. 5G will herald an even greater rise in the prominence of mobile access, enabling total ICT network growth and expansion. Over time, any mobile app and any mobile service will be given the potential to connect to anything at anytime – from people and communities to physical things, processes, content, working knowledge, pertinent information, and goods of all sorts in entirely flexible, reliable and secure ways. This is the promise of 5G – to expand the possibilities of what mobile networks can do, and to extend upon what services they can deliver.
Internet evolution
5G will drive the future evolution of the Internet itself. In fact, what we mean when we refer to the Internet is likely to change. Implementing the next generation of ubiquitous ultra-broadband network infrastructure will require a rethinking, restructuring and redesigning of approaches to mobile network construction and expansion, while integration of mass-scale cloud architectures will infuse mobile networks with capabilities for flexibly delivering services at unprecedented speeds while meeting forecasts for tremendous growth in mobile data traffic, diversification of mobile app innovation, IoT connectivity, and security. To achieve these goals, developments in 5G will primarily focus on two fundamental aspects for eliminating infrastructure bottlenecks – massive capacity and massive connectivity.
Immediacy & adaptability
Massive capacity for delivery of services will allow connections between end users and the network to be made at “faster than thought” speeds – so fast that the apparent distance between connected people and connected machines will shrink to virtually zero. Immediacy in mobile services will lay the foundation for a whole new set of mobile apps to proliferate and push the capabilities of communications beyond what is currently possible.
A more massive capacity for managing connections will better enable a greater widespread adoption of M2M services and interactions, and will facilitate innovation in localized mobile service delivery. The next wave of the digital society will be characterized by an ICT network’s capability for service immediacy and on-demand adaptability.
Challenges and requirements
The three fundamental requirements for building 5G wireless networks are capabilities that support 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; and flexible and efficient use of all available non-contiguous spectrum for vastly different network deployment scenarios.
Mobile networks will increasingly become the primary means of network access for person-to-person and personto- machine connectivity. These networks will need to
match advances in fixed networking in terms of delivered quality of service, reliability, and security. To do so, 5G technologies will need to be capable of delivering fiber-like 10Gbps speed to make possible ultra-high definition visual communications and immersive multimedia interactions.These technologies will depend on ultra-wide bandwidth with sub-millisecond latencies.
Smart cities
5G will provide the foundational infrastructure for building smart cities, which will push mobile network performance and capability requirements to their extremes. Low latency and extremely high reliability, however, will also be essential requirements for the likes of mobile industrial automation, vehicular connectivity, and other IoT applications. Smart sensors and text-based messaging are examples of extremely high-volume applications that will require very low data rates and will not be sensitive to latency.
Complex performance requirements
An increasingly diverse and wide range of mobile services will have differing performance requirements, from one millisecond to a few seconds, with always-on users per cell from a few hundred to several million, duty cycles from mere milliseconds to entire days, and signaling loads from less than 1% to almost 100%
The “5G HyperService Cube” (Figure 1) gives a multidimensional overview in terms of throughput, latency and number of connections required for the many types of services 5G networks will need to run.
5G networks face significant design challenges if they are to simultaneously meet all of the above service requirements. They must be built to meet a number of individual user and enterprise needs.
Immersive experience – At least 1Gbps or more data rates to support ultra-high definition video and virtual reality applications.
Fiber-like user experience – 10Gbps data rates to support mobile cloud service.
Zero latency and response times – Less than one millisecond latency to support real-time mobile control and vehicle-to-vehicle applications & communications.
Zero-second switching – Max 10-millisecond switching time between different radio access technologies to ensure a consistently seamless delivery of services.
Massive capacity & always-on operation – Current mobile network systems already support five billion users, but this will need to expand to also support several billionsof applications and hundreds of billions of machines.
Energy consumption – Energy-per-bit usage should be reduced by a factor of 1,000 to improve upon connected device battery life.
Spectrum impact
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 thousandfold capacity increases by 2020 and even higher increases looking forward to 2040 and beyond.
But while a global consensus is forming that 500MHz to 1GHz bandwidth of additional mobile spectrum is needed, spectrum band availability by region and the local laws that govern its usage will need to be harmonized so that global circulation and economies of scale for mobile devices are not negatively impacted. However, exactly how all available and new IMT bands will be used to achieve 10GB for an individual end user is a major challenge to the design of 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, increase network TVO, decrease network TCO, and reduce energy consumption.
Key technology drivers and innovations
While previous generations of wireless networks were characterized by fixed radio parameters and spectrum blocks, 5G will allow utilization of any spectrum and any access technology for the best delivery of services. What’s more, air interface and RAN systems will need to be completely redesigned to accommodate a new mobile access paradigm of massive capacity, huge numbers of connections, and ultra-fast network speeds.
5G will feature native support for new kinds of network deployments, including ultra-dense radio networking with self-backhauling, device-to-device communications, dynamic spectrum refarming, and radio access infrastructure sharing.
Necessary breakthroughs
The development of 5G will require new breakthroughs in multiple access and advanced waveform technologies combined with advances in coding and modulation algorithms are essential to realizing continuing improvements in spectral efficiency. This will accommodate the necessary scalability for massive IoT connectivity and drastic reductions in access latency.
New breakthroughs in the baseband and RF architecture are required to enable computationally intensive and adaptive new air interfaces. A significantly more advanced baseband computation is required to meet the complex requirements of new solutions like mass-scale MIMO. A singular, integrated design for combining an unprecedented number of RF radio and antenna elements into one unit (a “radiotenna”) will be needed to support these new air interfaces.
New breakthroughs in advanced RF domain processing will bring benefits to the efficient and flexible usage of spectrum; single-frequency full-duplex radio technologies will be a major contributor to increasing spectrum efficiency. Improvements in these areas will help drive overall network costs down while improving energy efficiency.
New breakthroughs in the integrated access node and backhaul design are required to enable the very dense networking of radio nodes. Plug-and-play functionality will become essential to deployment where such nodes will need to access and self-organize available spectrum blocks for both access and backhauling. This capability will be key for enabling high-frequency spectrum radio access. New breakthroughs in radio technologies for mobile devices are required to support a vast range of capabilities,from ultra-low energy sensors to ultra-fast devices with long-lasting battery life. Miniaturized multi-antenna technologies will be critical to enabling Gbps-level access speeds with less spectrum and lower power consumption.Further extending the capability of mobile devices is also of great importance in order to support certain base station functionalities. This will allow device-based, on-demand mobile networking for services such as instant device-todevice communications.
Virtualized architectures
Radio access infrastructures based on cloud architecture technologies will provide on-demand resource processing, storage and network capacity wherever needed. Softwaredefined air interface technologies will be seamlessly integrated into 5G wireless access network architectures. The evolution of RAN sites will develop toward a “hyper transceiver” approach to mobile access, and will help realize the joint-layer optimization of how radio resources are efficiently utilized.
Core network evolution will revolve around how to enable more flexibility for the creation of new services and new applications. Cloud computing will become the foundation of core networks, and will open the network to allow the leveraging of innovations as they are developed.5G core networks will also be equipped to seamlessly integrate with current 3G and 4G core networks.
All-spectrum access
New designs for all-spectrum radio access nodes will require breakthroughs in fundamental radio technologies like the air interface, RAN, radio frequency transceiver, and devices themselves. New radio backhaul and new fiber access for the fixed network will be an integral part of nextgeneration commercial network solutions. Figure 2 gives a basic overview of such a 5G radio-access architecture .
The next frontier
5G is the next frontier of innovation for the entire mobile industry. Its three major design objectives are implementation of massive capacity & massive connectivity; support for an increasingly diverse set of services, applications and users (all with extremely diverse requirements); and flexible & efficient use of all available non-contiguous spectrum for widely different network deployment scenarios.
An adaptive network solution framework will be a necessity to accommodating both LTE and air interface evolution. Cloud, SDN, and NFV technologies will reshape the entire mobile ecosystem, and 5G will speed up creation of mass-scale services & applications.
The next decade promises breakthrough developments in several fundamental RAN technologies that will be required for implementing commercial-ready 5G network solutions, including multiple access and advanced waveform technologies combined with coding and modulation algorithms; interference management; access protocols; service delivery architecture; mass-scale MIMO; single-frequency full-duplex radio technologies;5G devices; and virtualized and cloud-based radio access infrastructure.
5G success depends on the entire ICT ecosystem. Its growth will be built upon global LTE success. ICT ecosystem innovation will also be a key driver in creating a larger 5G market.
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