Work has begun in earnest on developing 5G, the next generation of mobile communications technology. It promises to create an adaptive wireless network that will be capable of handling the ever increasing amounts of data that are required to meet the demands of our technology-driven lives.
Many of us may just be getting used to its predecessor 4G, and wonder just how much difference there will really be between them, but there is much to get excited about. In particular, thanks to increased data handling capabilities, much faster speeds, lower power usage and better reliability and security, 5G is predicted to push forward the development of technologies such as driverless cars, remote surgery and the internet of things.
Big businesses and governments are now investing a great deal in the research and development of this step-change technology with the goal of rolling it out by 2020. Our own government and academic institutions are working hard to make the UK a leader in 5G.
While in the very early stages of 5G testing, academics at the University of Surrey have already been making some impressive breakthroughs. Leading the way in the country’s research efforts, the university now hosts the UK’s first 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC). The centre was founded by a host of telecoms industry partners including Vodafone, Telefonica, Huawei, Samsung, Fujitsu, EE and BT, and received £11.6 million of government funding. The centre boasts £18 million worth of specialist radio, software and computing equipment that powers what is the world’s first open 5G test bed.
With the aim of delivering innovation from the lab to the real world, the 5GIC test bed is split into three key areas: mobile broadband radio, fixed core network and service platform based on software-defined networking, and the internet of things. Professor Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5GIC, says: “The plan is that all these three test beds will be integrated into one system which will become 5G. These will be open facilities where we will welcome industry (large and small and start-ups) and academia to take advantage of our facilities for the furthering of communications technologies and applications as a whole.
“This will enable us to translate research from the lab to a real-world environment, along with industry partners who will be able to work with us to translate technical breakthroughs to deliver 5G applications and continuously feed our work into standardisations of the system.”
Although the official launch of the centre isn’t until September, the 5GIC researchers have already been grabbing headlines with the news that they achieved record-breaking speeds of one terabit per second over a distance of 100m – more than 65,000 times faster than average 4G download speeds. However, Tafazolli explains that this is but one area of research and that there is a lot more to the work they are carrying out. “The focus of our research is on developing technologies that are flexible, reliable and evolvable, and provide extremely low delays,” he says. “It is important to note that we are not designing 5G for a specific application or service.
“In terms of ongoing work, there are several new, important breakthroughs coming from the centre in recent months. We filed 10 patents in 2014 and more are in the pipeline.” These patents have included a solution to interference that limits efficient use of the radio spectrum, a new energy harvesting technique which uses ambient energy with high conversion efficiencies, and the ability to detect user direction and to track movements without the use of GPS.
Tafazolli explains that implicit in the move to the term ‘5G’ is that there will be a step change in capability and performance compared with 4G. A transformative technology, it will be a wireless internet network but not as as we know it.
“5G will not simply be a new network like 2G, 3G and 4G were,” he says. “It will be a heterogeneous network of different technologies which will provide wireless coverage in an environment with a wide variety of wireless zones, ranging from open outdoor environments to office buildings, homes and underground areas.”
With 5G, the network and devices will decide how to use the access networks available in any location (including 2G, 3G, variations of 4G, wi-fi, small cells and wide area mobile) and different frequency bands to deliver sufficient capacity to all active users so that they have the impression that the capacity is always sufficient, or, as Tafazolli says, that there is an impression of “infinite capacity”.
To support this increased demand for radio spectrum, 5G will have to make use of higher frequencies than currently used, operating seamlessly over a range of frequency bands, below 6GHz and also below 1GHz, for cost-effective provision of broadband to rural areas.
This, explains Tafazolli, will evolve over time to higher frequencies such as centimetric and millimetric bands and will co-exist with other systems such as satellite communications. He adds: “Essentially, 5G will be a holistic framework for all our communications needs, and it will need to be flexible enough to evolve, adapt and grow – just as the internet has.”
As such, Tafazolli says that 5G is referred to as a “special generation” technology that will have several orders of magnitude reduction in latency and a huge increase in capacity and reliability. While no official requirements have been specified for 5G as yet, the general consensus worldwide is that it will be determined by low delays of around 1 millisecond, high reliability/availability of more than 99.999%, and cell capacity of 10 gigabits per second, with minimum capacity per user of 1Gbps.
However, there is still a lot of work to be done and barriers to overcome before the technology is able to reach these high specifications. Two of the major issues to tackle are low end-to-end latency and high reliability – things that the researchers at 5GIC will be working hard to achieve over the next few years.
Other practical issues to solve when developing the 5G network will be the need to reduce end user costs. Tafazolli says: “Given that data requirements may grow up to a hundred-fold, monthly bills cannot increase by the same amount if emerging technologies are to be accessible for mainstream use.” In addition, reducing energy consumption will be another key focus, both to lessen emissions and to improve end-user benefits such as enabling longer battery life and providing innovative energy solutions for wearable devices.
Tafazolli adds: “One result will be that in the future there will be a wide range of business models – for example as well as paying operators to provide us with coverage, we may be able to charge others for the coverage we provide with our wi-fi routers or femtocell home base stations.”
This technology will not only have a large impact on our everyday lives but on that of running businesses and factories, welcoming in the age of the ‘smart factory’. Keith Robson, chief operating officer at 5GIC, explains that for 5G to be used safely and reliably in industrial applications it must reach very low levels of latency, with researchers aiming for delays of just 1 millisecond.
The ultra low end-to-end latency expected to be achieved by the technology will therefore push forward critical realtime applications that require a much more immediate response than anything today’s wireless technologies are capable of. This would include driverless cars, virtual reality and the phenomenon known as the ‘tactile internet’, a web connection so responsive that you could transmit human touch and movements to machines. For example, robot proxies could be used to treat patients in an outbreak of Ebola.
Robson says: “When people talk about the ‘tactile internet’, clearly there are a few limiting physical factors, not least the speed of light. We will never transcend that speed, there is a certain fixed time delay once you go beyond around 300km, which is about
1 millisecond.
“However, it is potentially another revolution in the making for industrial applications, for robotics, remote healthcare and surgery. Similarly it will advance the internet of things where you have many more sensors in an environment but this time connected to actuators so that we get much better environmental controls.”
In particular, 5G is expected to have huge applications for robotics – great news for manufacturers. Robson says: “The problem with robotics is that the sheer amount of intelligence that you really need in your devices has always been a limiting factor. People are starting to get to the point where robots can power themselves but what 5G could do is to have the real brain situated somewhere else.”
In a set-up known as cloud robotics, manufacturing lines could monitor and gather data using sensors which is then transferred via 5G to a central ‘cloud’ database. A variety of methods and techniques will then process the intelligence of the robot remotely. Without the need for wires the robots will be able to have a greater range of movement.
Combining low latency with the 99.999% reliability that 5G is expected to achieve will mean that the internet will also be usable for much more critical applications, such as health and realtime industrial monitoring.
Robson explains that 4G was largely designed over the old voice architecture that already existed but starting afresh with all that they now know about secure information will fundamentally change the way they digitise, break up and handle the packaging of data. “It is almost like saying ‘we’re going to construct this so that the actual building blocks have the highest levels of security needed’ before you start building up to the top levels of security of the system,” he explains.
This will mean that services such as Skype can be handled in a much more robust way, and open up safer and more secure communication. This, says Robson, could see businesses and organisations such as the NHS holding many more remote consultations over a very secure network.
Robson also predicts that the increased levels of security that 5G will offer will boost the commercial drone industry. “Clearly there are sensitive military applications carried out by drones but that is just a tiny part of it,” he says. “There are immense security and safety implications for the commercial uses too.
“For example, fail-safe mechanisms must be built in and you must be able to prevent people from taking over the drones that are delivering packages.”
However, for the immediate future, work at the 5GIC will focus on finishing construction of its test bed, which is due by the end of July. It will then look to extend its test bed and pilot the technology with seven local small firms.
Robson says: “Given the scale and complexity, it is now really important to liaise with other centres in the UK and Europe. While we have at our heart the interest to make the UK a very attractive place for companies to come and do their innovation development, we will over the next few months talk more seriously with national partners in the UK and Europe.”
Tafazolli says that with the massive investment and attention that 5G is receiving around the world he believes the predicted 2020 roll-out is achievable – but it will require a joined-up, global effort to succeed. He says: “At the core of our 5G Innovation Centre’s philosophy is open collaboration. Standards will not be agreed in isolation and we are looking forward to realising the UK’s impact in these global advances.”
Dawn of the tactile internet
King’s College London has announced a collaboration with Ericsson that will see it set up a 5G tactile internet lab with test bed capabilities. The college says the lab will enable the “easy creation, testing and realtime adaptation of radio technology in software”. This will occur in devices and remotely in Cloud-RAN experiments.