5G – What is it?
Category : Pulse
The recent announcement from AT&T following the previous Verizon one, can make us ask ourselves what is going to be included in 5G? It is worth going back to the NGMN whitepaper and have a closer look (at Annex D).
It is clear that 5G will include a broad set of ingredients (as AT&T calls them) that will contribute to fulfill the ambitious requirements on latency, throughput, coverage and amount of devices supported. It is also understood that not all requirements will be met by the same network at the same time but only combinations of them will be available fitting the needs of the use cases.
There will be a new radio technology although its not yet crystal clear if it will include usage of mmWave indoors or taking advantage of unlicensed spectrum. Maybe we will see disruptive innovations with new waveforms and radio frames. Some other advances will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary with more MIMO, interference coordination and usage of multiple access; these mostly focusing in the densification use case.
The more disruptive radio changes come later in the roadmap but now some of the other ingredients are already identifiable:
– C-RAN is about virtualizing the software elements in the radio access and adds flexibility and operational gains for the operators having less costs to maintain the increasing number of sites.
– Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) bringing the core and the applications nearer or directly to the access network; fundamental to reduce latency and improve user experience.
– New Fronthaul/Backhaul as a side effect of C-RAN and MEC the FH and BH will combine and mix dynamically in deployments.
– NFV/SDN will be the necessary enabler of many of the networks changes to achieve the flexibility and dynamic behavior of 5G.
– Network slicing (also called verticalization by me in the past) permits to divide and adapt the network to the needs of specific use cases.
IoT is actually a use case of 5G but a very prominent one which requires its own specific set of ingredients covering the massive amount of devices and new traffic profiles. Its becoming one of the hottest topics.
I’m going to be next week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress searching for interesting demos and propositions in these areas. I am sure I will get material for a short report or a series of blog entries about 5G, IoT and NFV/SDN.
By the way, someone thought (not me!) it was a good idea to record me during a presentation at the LTE North America conference last November talking about some of these emerging technologies and their signaling impact to the core network.
The picture is from Mike Atkinson with Creative Commons license.