What is 5g, Know before you use it!

Clearly, 4G has revolutionized the Indian smartphone market. It has transformed people’s life digitally. With the introduction of 4G networks, video streaming services have ramped up in India, leading to the development of several online apps for users. Surely, 4G created an ecosystem for digital content and its creators. It allowed the user to access data with several hundred Mbps peak speed and several kbps to a few Mbps average data rate. But due to the advancement of technology, there is a need for a much more capable network, which not only allows super higher data rate but also the data access round time (latency) should be very low. Moreover, the network should be capable of connecting 100x more users as compared to the 4G network. To address these issues, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) set up a standard for developing the next generation of mobile communication in the year 2015, the standard is popularly known as IMT-2020. This article brings several points on the 5G communication which is essential to know.

The rise of 5G:

Here the author is not intended to bore the reader by starting the historic aspects of cellular communication. Rather it would be great if we can understand the need for such a generation change from 1G to 5G in cellular communication.

Till 2G communication, the primary goal of the cellular technology was to provide voice call service access to maximum users, thus maximization of voice channel capacity was the primary goal.

 With the rise of 3G, the data services began to increase. People started using the internet on their cell phones, play online games, and make video calls. 

With 4G, the same activities ramped up, on top of that live streaming, expansion of cloud-based services to provide online applications also have increased multiple times.

So far, all the cellular networking technology primarily focused on a person to person communication. But people thought what if we can make our daily life objects like houses, cars, buses, fans, air conditioners, factories, offices, etc. to be able to talk to each other and be aware of each other, it would help us in many aspects.

 Let me explain, if a signal post at the road can talk to the car it can alert the car about any pedestrian crossing the road even if the driver can’t notice the person. In this way, many accidents can be avoided.

Similarly, in an industrial area with proper sensors and cameras, one intelligent system can supervise the operation, where the sensors and cameras are connected with the internet by using a high-speed connection.

There are numerous examples of such cases where a huge number of the user equipment is connected to the internet wirelessly. For, this the wireless network should be robust, also should have enough capacity to serve such an extremely large no of user equipment.  

By using 5G we will be close to building a smart city

The 5G is designed in such a way it can serve us in mainly 3 ways,

first, it is going to provide eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband);

second, it allows mMTC (massive Machine Type Communications);

third, it should provide URLLC (Ultra-reliable and Low latency communications)

In 2015 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) released one road map for developing 5G, which is popular with the name of IMT-2020. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a community of system designs and industries addresses every roadmap of ITU. In this case, 3gpp addressed ITU roadmap and came up with a lot of recommendations in its release-15 (link). That led us to the foundation of 5G. let us see one by one, what these roadmap and recommendations are?

ITU roadmap for 5G (IMT-2020):

To understand the roadmap and requirements of 5G we need to take help of the following picture:

ITU-R roadmap for 5G, IMT-2020, pic courtesy: Recommendation ITU-R M.2083-0 (09/2015)

Each vertex of the triangle represents 3 basic types of application namely, eMBB, mMTC, & URLLC

eMBB: This application targets the use of broadband internet services for cellular telephony communication. This means, in 5G communication is going to support high bandwidth applications like 4K & higher resolution streaming, online Virtual reality games & movies, remote VR communication, Ultra-high video transmission during video conferencing, etc. IMT-2020 roadmap says that the typical user experience would be, ‘>10 Gbps Peak data rates & 100 Mbps Whenever needed’.

mMTC: In this category 5G targets the ‘machine type communication’. It includes 3 types of data transfer, machine to human, human to machine & machine to machine. 5G is going to implement a very unique concept in which various devices talk to each other via the Internet. This is something called the Internet of Things IoT(link). IoT is a fundamental concept to realize the ‘smart city’. In a smart city everything should be ‘smart’, in other words, should have the awareness of its surroundings also, every device would be connected to the internet. To do this we need a very robust wireless network that can have a very high connection density. 5G roadmap has a vision of 1,000,000 devices per square km which is very much essential to support IoT & smart city. By implementing 5G we will be one step closer to a smart city.

URLLC: Among the 3 vertices, this is something new. It says, ‘ultra-reliable low latency communication’. Let us try to understand each term. ‘Ultra-reliable’ means a network that can deliver our data from source to the destination with a probability of 99.999% (link) according to the roadmap. On the other hand, ‘low latency’ means there will be a very little delay between data transmission & data reception within the 5G network, IMT-2020 targets for a latency of 1millisecond (link). Typically for 4G the average latency of 40 – 50 millisecond. The application in this category consists of driverless cars, mission-critical data transfer, and the most exaggerated application is remote surgery (link). 

As you can see in all the types of applications, voice services have not been considered. Well, there is a reason behind this, beyond 3G (4G, 5G, 6G, and next to any G), our voice data is sent in form of ‘voice packets’ instead of making a dedicated path between speaker & listener. Our data is digitized in 4G (called VoLTE similar to VoIP) & 5G which means we can easily transmit the ‘voice packets’, so the voice is not a problem now. All the other application sits in between the 3 vertices of the triangle, the picture speaks itself.

Conclusion:

In this article, the typical application of 5G was pointed out, they are in a course grade, enhanced Mobile Broadband, Massive Machine-Type Communications, & Ultra-reliable and Low latency communications. We also have seen the 5G is going to realize the concept of a smart city. In a small note, it was also shown how voice is being transmitted over 4G & 5G networks. 5G has rolled out in several parts of the world in 2019. 'How far is 5G in India?' is also well documented in a separate blog, here (link). A small introduction to the 5G network structure is required after this, which will be covered in future blogs.