A review of 5G mobile technology

Abstract:  

5G ( 5th generation mobile networks or 5th generation wireless systems ) is a name used in some research papers and projects to denote the next major phase of mobile telecommunications standards beyond the upcoming 4G standards (expected to be finalized between approximately 2011 and 2013). Currently, 5G is not a term officially used for any particular specification or in any official document yet made public by telecommunication companies or standardization bodies such as 3GPP, WiMAX Forum or ITU-R. New 3GPP standard releases beyond 4G and LTE Advanced are in progress, but not considered as new mobile generations. The implementation of standards under a 5G umbrella would likely be around the year 2020. 5G Technology stands for 5th Generation Mobile technology. 5G technology has changed the means to use cell phones within very high bandwidth. The user never experienced ever before such a high-value technology. Nowadays mobile users have much awareness of cell phone (mobile) technology. The 5G technologies include all types of advanced features which make 5G technology the most powerful and in huge demand in the near future.

1. Introduction

5G technology going to be a new mobile revolution in the mobile market. Through 5G technology now you can use worldwide cellular phones and this technology also strike the china mobile market and a user being proficient to get access to Germany phone as a local phone. With the coming out of cell phone alike to PDA now your whole office at your fingertips or in your phone. 5G technology has extraordinary data capabilities and has the ability to tie together unrestricted call volumes and infinite data broadcast within the latest mobile operating system. 5G technology has a bright future because it can handle the best technologies and offer priceless handset to its customers. Maybe in the coming days, 5G technology takes over the world market.

5G Technologies have an extraordinary capability to support Software and Consultancy. The Router and switch technology used in the 5G network providing high connectivity. The 5G technology distributes internet access to nodes within the building and can be deployed with a union of wired or wireless network connections. The current trend of 5G technology has a glowing future.

The 5G terminals will have software-defined radios and modulation schemes as well as new error-control schemes that can be downloaded from the Internet. The development is seen towards the user terminals as a focus of the 5G mobile networks. The terminals will have access to different wireless technologies at the same time and the terminal should be able to combine different flows from different technologies. The vertical handovers should be avoided because they are not feasible in a case when there are many technologies and many operators and service providers. In 5G, each network will be responsible for handling user-mobility, while the terminal will make the final choice among different wireless/mobile access network providers for a given service. Such a choice will be based on open intelligent middleware on the mobile phone.

During the last two decades, the world has witnessed the rapid evolution of cellular communication technologies from the 2G Global System for Mobile (GSM) to the 4G Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system. The main motivation has been the need for more bandwidth and lower latency. While throughput is the actual data transfer rate, latency depends largely on the processing speed of each node data streams traverse through. Together with throughput-related performance enhancements, some allied parameters, such as jitter, inter-channel interference, connectivity, scalability, energy-efficiency, and compatibility with legacy networks, are also taken into consideration when developing new mobile technology.

When technology advanced from the 2G GSM to the 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), higher network speed and faster download speed allowed real-time video calls. LTE and the subsequent LTE-A offered enhanced network capacity and reduced delay in application–server access, making triple-play traffic (data, voice, and video) access possible wirelessly, anytime anywhere. 4G truly constitutes mobile broadband. Although 3G was the first mobile broadband standard, it was originally designed for voice with some multimedia and data consideration, whereas 2G was intended as the first digital mobile voice communication standard for improved coverage. The data rate has improved from 64 kbps in 2G to 2 Mbps in 3G and 50–100 Mbps in 4G. 5G is expected to enhance not only the data transfer speed of mobile networks but also the scalability, connectivity, and energy efficiency of the network. It is assumed that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the global IP network, which would appear to present a challenge. In a true “networked society” remote-controlled operation of appliances and critical commercial machines over a reliable 5G network will be possible with zero delays. Real-time control of machines by using mobile devices will be possible, making the Internet of things (IoT) more available to all. Finally, but not least important, less energy-hungry network nodes will be required toward a greener world. Therefore, the following are the most important elements in the descr iption of 5G: high throughput, low-latency, high reliability, increased scalability, and energy-efficient mobile communication technology.

2. Futuristic scenarios and 5G compliance

The society of 2020 will be a connected society. The IoT together with intelligent and integrated sensor systems and in-home sensor networks will change the way people lead their lives. “Smart living” people will require constant and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to the network to upload their activity data and IoT control commands, thus generating a “massive reporting” uplink data flow. Massive machine to machine communication and critical machine to machine communication will play pivotal roles in service delivery and industry operations.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are constantly advancing. By 2020, VANETs integrated with cellular networks will be in operation as a VANET cloud, leading to a smarter and safer transportation system.

When the number of devices connected to the Internet passes tens or hundreds of billions in the coming decade, the offloading of networked data on unlicensed bands will play a critical role in network load balancing, providing guaranteed bit rate services and a reduction in control signaling. Hence, it is important that 5G will provide seamless compatibility with dense heterogeneous networks to satisfy the high demand for real-time traffic so that end-users will experience smooth connectivity to the network.

3. Developments toward 5G technologies

Many well-known technologies or schemes, such as modulation techniques, radio access techniques, or distributed computing, could be reused in 5G with a few alterations together with many other newly developed and evolved solutions. Hence, we limited our literature review to very recent research papers, white papers, industry products, and market requirements. For example, Cisco Inc. publishes a white paper, the Visual Networking Index (VNI), annually. The Cisco VNI report forecasts global mobile data traffic, and the latest VNI report, published in February 2015 showed interesting predictions: the monthly global mobile data traffic will pass 24.3 Exabytes (EB), which is ten times the current mobile traffic, by 2019, and the number of devices connected to networks will soon surpass the entire world population.

3.1. Millimeter-wave communication

To achieve 1000× speed enhancement, the first step is to use the mm-wave (with a wavelength on the order of millimeters) spectrum (3–300 GHz range) as the carrier frequency together with opportunistic traffic offloading onto an unlicensed spectrum (5 GHz Wi-Fi). The current cellular licensed carrier spans from the saturated 750 MHz to the 2600 MHz spectrum. Hence, the design of the most under-utilized physical layers (PHY layers) of the mm-wave spectrum is required. In addition, massive MIMO, beamforming, traffic offloading on to unlicensed spectra and cloudification of radio resources will provide faster data transfer and guaranteed availability. Rappaport et al. showed the propagation behavior, penetration characteristics, and path loss of 28 GHz and 38 GHz carriers resulting from urban structures. The data presented in this paper are certainly useful for designing the PHY layer of 5G deploying the mm-wave. Levanen et al. designed an ultra-low latency mm-wave communication for 5G.

3.2. Architecture

5G will have a well-connected core network and RAN. The backbone network may even shift from fiber to mm-wave wireless connectivity, and the interconnected base stations should use high bandwidth wired connections. As the number of connected devices increases, a typical macro-cell may be heavily burdened with controlling overheads to maintain connectivity with a huge number of devices (around 10 k per cell). Therefore, the architecture must be less complex and evolved to accommodate an increased amount of signaling and payload overhead. The performance of such a futuristic 5G architecture, deploying mm-wave RAN, in the Giga KOREA 5G project has been reported. The authors also elucidated graphical representations of the antenna array structures for 3D beam-forming in the report and described how the beam control mechanism facilitates fast handover among different beams.

3D beam-formation is achieved with the help of a 2D array of patch antennae. Highly directive beams of radio transmission signals formed in 3-dimensional spaces, emanating from the 2D array of patch antennae, help to achieve space division multiple access (SDMA). This essentially can be termed beam division multiple access (BDMA). In user equipment, they installed the patch antenna arrays consisting of a 2D NXM number of patch antennae. A quick handoff capability between different beams makes the radio access technique robust, secure, and highly reliable.

Moreover, to overcome the limited coverage of mm-wave RAN, “relay” transmission is used and the handoff process may no longer be controlled by the core node but rather by the base station. In 4G LTE, the base station or eNB performs this resource allocation task. Many scheduling algorithms have been proposed for achieving better QoS in LTE. Such an intelligent resource allocation scheme was proposed for cognitive radio links, based on game-theoretic computations. 5G should use this type of optimal distributed resource allocation algorithm in case of macro cell-based operations, where beamforming may not be possible. Not only an increase in the capacity of RAN, but also an evolved core network, which is flexible, intelligent, easy to install, and low cost, are desirable. Moreover, recent development in cloud-based networking has triggered possibilities of virtualized core networks.

3.3. Modulation technique better than OFDM

Spectral efficiency depends mainly on the multiple access technique and modulation scheme used. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is used as the modulation scheme and multiple access strategies in LTE-Advanced (4G). OFDMA succeeds in a code division multiple access (CDMA), which was used in 3G cellular telephony. Further improvements in OFDMA should be able to handle a high peak-to average-power ratio (PAPR) and its need for cyclic prefixes (CPs) to prevent inter-block interference. Moreover, OFDM’s applicability on wideband mm-wave with the required hardware setup is not certain. A comparative study of FBMC, universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), and OFDM modulation schemes in 5G were presented in.

3.4. Cloud: RAN-as-a-service

RAN can be viewed as the front-haul network segment. The air interface of 5G will have an interesting feature to carry high definition real-time video to very low bandwidth control signals for the IoT. Although important physical attributes, such as modulation, coding scheme, and a massive MIMO, are a direct part of RAN, this subsection focuses mainly on an emerging revolutionizing field called Cloud-RAN. The entirely new application of cloud services in RAN deployment is the most important anticipated element of 5G. Sabella et al. showed the benefits of RAN-as-a-service (RANaaS) in terms of network sustainability and energy efficiency. The idea behind the cloud-based RANaaS is keeping the RAN capacity in a centralized server and making it available to the customer on demand. To achieve this, the base stations need to be segregated into a radio access unit and baseband unit and a reserve pool of the baseband unit needs to be created to satisfy any cell that experiences high traffic. Low power small cells should be deployed to reduce energy consumption and make the reserved capacity available to the cell that needs it because of a sudden surge in traffic. They have also shown that computational power and energy efficiency will be further optimized with the availability of newer cloud computing platforms and the upcoming data-center servers. Not only the RAN but also the core and backbone network may be virtualized, as schematically by means of cloud-based resource availability.

3.5. Energy efficiency

Energy consumption is a major factor in the large scale deployment of new networks. Currently, more than 0.5% of the world’s total energy is consumed by the mobile networks. Therefore, a reduction in energy requirements is one of the major aspects of 5G development not only from environmental needs but also from the network maintenance perspective. Tombaz and Sung numerically showed that a network densified by cell size reduction has unavoidable network energy requirements. As the network will have a greater number of smaller cells, the major energy consumption component will be the idling and backhauling power. A candidate 5G framework with software-defined MAC and network functional virtualization has been deployed. By integrating these solutions, Tombaz and Sung envisage a low latency yet energy-efficient 5G network. In their research effort, called the 5GrEEn Project reported in, they agreed with the authors of concerning the logical separation of the control and data planes as a potential solution toward an energy-efficient and flexible 5G architecture. The 5GrEEn project aims to introduce an energy-efficient and optimized heterogeneous network (HetNet) architecture for various traffic demands and scenarios to provide improved capacity. Cloud resources should also be allocated sensibly. “Anchor”, a versatile resource management framework in the cloud, has been proposed, implemented, and evaluated.

3.6. Protocol stack

Any communication system performs on the basis of a layered protocol stack. Gohil et al. in their 5G survey, presented the general protocol stack for next-generation end-to-end mobile communication. Authors envisaged for a universal communication standard. The noticeable feature of the stack is its provision for compatibility with other open-source protocols. They discussed the Open Transport protocol (OTP), which can be downloaded by any user equipment when required. The user equipment may be connected to more than one base station (in fact, base stations may belong to different networks).

4. Conclusion

This article provides a comprehensive review of some recent initiatives toward a green, flexible, and most dominant 5G mobile communication standard. Important issues, from an improved substitute for OFDMA to energy-efficient D2D communication research endeavors, were briefly described. However, there are many issues that could not be presented because of space limitations.

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