Page 5 - 5G Basics - Core Network Aspects

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced an IMT-2020 vision as future IMT systems
should support the enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) use case, emerging use cases with a variety of
applications such as massive machine-type communications (mMTC) and ultra-reliable and low latency
communications (URLLC).

Looking into the future, analysts’ say that new demands, such as more traffic volume, many more devices
with large gamma of service requirements, better quality of user experience (QoE) and better affordability
by further reducing costs, will require an increasing number of innovative solutions. The same forecast
experts claim, billions of people and devices in 5G networks will communicate at a speed of 1 Gbit/s.
Technology allowing this should be in place by 2020.
The new generation of the mobile communication changes roughly each 10 years. Nowadays we are rapidly
approaching the 5G era of mobile communication. One can question why 4G systems are not good? The
answer comes from the ITU-R 5G vision document that the exponential growth of the need for
communication over the wireless devises by the end of 2020 will require the high reaction of the system
(ideally with the delay less that one millisecond) and ultra-broadband connectivity of mass mobile devices.
This may be further described by the increased flexibility end-to-end, mobility of users while accessing a
service, energy efficiency and system reliability.
To set up first steps towards this, ITU-T work on such a pre-5G area as virtualization of the networks further
developed in the orchestrated software defined networking solutions. IMT-2020 network management and
orchestration should support a combination of IMT-2020 network systems and existing systems (e.g., LTE-
Advanced, Wi-Fi and Fixed Network), coupled with new/revolutionary technologies designed to meet new
customer’s demands. To meet these new requirements, the cost of deployment and operation will increase
enormously. Network operators need to optimize CAPEX/OPEX by strategically interacting with multiple
technology ecosystems especially for different radio/fixed access and virtualized core network technologies.
Therefore, management and orchestration for IMT-2020 network is required to support both existing
networks as well as evolving networks in an integrated manner.
What is the difference from the previous generation of mobile communication? It is a very rapid response of
the system that allows multiple applications to provide services almost immediately. This will have
implementations in the remote surgery and best route choice for medical emergency to reach the car
accident site, autonomous driving, bus/fleet traffic management, railways or high speed train
communication, robotics and factory manipulators automation, holograms creation, other latency critical
applications. To give some figures, in the future the user will get used to the high quality video/text
information he gets on his wireless device at a speed of 10 Gbit/s with the system reply less than 1 ms.

A dream to have reliable services anytime everywhere at any unit with stable quality independent of the
access is coming true. In order to have such high-speed communication the latter is pushed to the upper
frequency bands, tens GHz. These frequency bands are not much in use and will provide a bandwidth for the
high-speed communication. However the particularity of such frequency bands is an elevated signal loss or
changes at the recipient side. To avoid this the antennas of the receivers should be located in the proximity
of the end user. Visible obstacles also caused problems to radio waves propagation at these frequencies.
Therefore to suit a requirement of the high speed communication the signal should be routed using the
optimal path to each concrete user taking into account its move relatively to the base station.
Trials of 5G networks prototypes have already been presented by such companies as: Huawei, Vodafone,
Nokia, Sonera, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Cisco, Samsung, Huawei, NTT DoCoMo and others. These and other
representatives of the telecommunication market offer various innovative solutions for the 5G. For example,
recently, Optus and Huawei have improved the data rate record in pre-5G networks, raising them to 35
Gbit/s, having tests at 73 GHz, and at the international economic forum in St. Petersburg MegaFon and
Huawei presented the fifth generation base station in operation, in the millimetre frequency range at a
frequency of 70 GHz with a bandwidth of 2 GHz, having demonstrated the work of the fifth-generation
network at a speed of 35 Gbit/s.

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