5G to unlock next 20 years of digital services

By Guru Ganesan

Spectrum is a precious resource and with the tremendous growth that mobile phone market has seen the last two decades, the demand for mobile services too has exploded and consequently, so has the demand for radio spectrum.

Traditionally we think of radio spectrum as being divided into ‘blocks’ or ‘carriers’ that can be applied to different purposes such as TV, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or mobile phones. The allocation of spectrum to various purposes is managed regionally by regulators such as DoT in India, FCC in the US and OFCOM in the UK.

In the early days of mobile phones it was relatively simple. Blocks of spectrum were allocated (typically by auction) for the purpose of providing predominantly voice-based services, which in their very nature consumed very small amounts of spectrum. During the last decade, that situation changed and spectrum was more and more used for mobile broadband services. Generally speaking, the higher the throughput delivered to the user, the more spectrum that is used to deliver that service. If you also multiply that by the number of users, you see very quickly that demand outstrips supply for mobile data. Spectrum allocation in the traditional sense doesn’t keep-up.

Licensed bands are parts of the spectrum that have particular limitations of use imposed on them; for example a block of spectrum may be restricted to mobile services use and allocated to a particular cellular carrier. The advantage of a licensed band is that the carrier has complete control of that part of the spectrum, so can manage the quality of service (QoS) and provision accordingly. The limitation of licensed band is that it is an ever more precious resource unable to meet the ever growing demands of mobile data and the rapidly growing number of subscribers. To counter this, operators are increasingly looking at how they can use unlicensed bands in combination with their existing licensed band services. The use of devices in unlicensed spectrum was first authorised by the FCC in the US in 1938. Increasingly we are seeing a drive to include unlicensed bands in carrier aggregation whereby a device can simultaneously use both licensed bands (often as a control channel) with unlicensed offload e.g. to technologies such as Wi-Fi as well as emerging LTE-Unlicensed technology. Many of the remaining advances in the LTE standard within 3GPP are focused on the management of these unlicensed offload techniques.

The heart of 5G will bring new modulation and ever more complex MIMO techniques to maximise the efficiency of the precious spectrum resource and to offer up to 50x increase in throughput compared to early LTE capabilities. The notion of 5G is also to cover a very wide range of frequency bands, far beyond what we are seeing in LTE today. The rationale for this is to harmonise access technologies across all of the bands and to maximise efficiency whilst working to build increased capacity for the next generation of services. From sub GHz bands that will provide wide area services, through to local area GHz bands used widely today by Wi-Fi, we will see 5G in a broad range of deployment scenarios.

Extending further, 5G promises to open as yet underutilised mm wave bands beyond 30GHz. These bands offer the ability to deliver the headline multi-Gbps throughput rates often associated with 5G. The drawback of mm wave bands is one of coverage: we can only expect devices to work within “line of sight” and a few tens of meters of the base station, which in itself will bring deployment challenges.

Mobile technology & 5G

The complexity of smartphones is not often fully appreciated, with the average smartphone containing at least 10 ARM based processors, managing functions such as touch screen, sensor processing, location/positioning, camera, graphics, applications as well as the ever growing plethora of connectivity such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and LTE.

With the wireless industry gearing-up to standardize the next generation of mobile broadband devices, or so called ‘5G’, let’s take a look at what that will mean in terms of technologies, challenges and the use cases that it will ultimately enable.

As mobile broadband continues to evolve, we see both new and evolved use cases opening-up. The dawn of 5G will bring a continuation of the always on, always connected world and in turn bring new ways of interacting with it. Also, as multi-gigabit services, 5G promises to deliver on low throughput, energy constrained devices or so called “Massive Machine-Type Communications” (mMTC).

Mobile devices are what come immediately to mind when we think 5G. Given the sophistication of our smartphone experience today, how is that set to differ with the advent of 5G? A number of the proposals being considered for 5G standardization are around network efficiencies, mostly looking at how to manage the sheer volume and demand of mobile data. Multi-gigabit services will allow consumers to download digital content near instantaneously and ultra-low latency connections enable services such as virtual and augmented reality and enable new automotive applications.

Beyond traditional mobile we see 5G as a key enabling technology for a plethora of additional services. 5G will bring remote telemedicine to reality allowing physicians and healthcare workers to remotely manage patients via 5G connected devices, a true opportunity to democratise healthcare and wellbeing.

The low carbon economy represents arguably one of the greatest challenges to the world over the next decade. The widespread availability of efficient and reliable wireless internet will help in achieving this low carbon economy, through enabling efficiency and bringing greater levels of control and integration. From managing smart street lighting, remote emissions monitoring, public transport and public information there are countless opportunities for 5G to have an impact on the way we live our daily lives. Even the 5G network architecture itself has a requirement to reduce energy consumption, which alongwith reducing opex for the mobile operator would also significantly reduce carbon emissions.

5G is also expected to bring new experiences within the home and when we drive our cars. 5G is seen as the ‘beyond mobile internet’ technology. 5G’s expected capacity and low latency will allow it to be deployed in ways not previously accessible with traditional 4G/Wi-Fi services. As an example, the area of connected car and autonomous driving is seen as a key area that depends heavily on highly reliable low latency wireless connectivity for applications such as safety and collision avoidance, and it is envisioned that this use case will be unlocked with 5G.

Though 5G promises a lot, but as a standard is not yet even defined. As we have seen in the previous section, if it is done well, then 5G will unlock the next 20 years of digital services bringing new and enhanced use cases to our everyday lives.

(The author Guru Ganesan is President, ARM India)