5G

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 4G/IMT-Advanced standards effective since 2011. At present, 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 standard releases beyond 4G are in progress by standardization bodies, but are at this time not considered as new mobile generations but under the 4G umbrella.

Prognosis

Were a 5G family of standards to be implemented, it would likely be around the year 2020, according to some sources.^[1] A new mobile generation has appeared every 10th year since the first 1G system (NMT) was introduced in 1981, including the 2G (GSM) system that started to roll out in 1992, 3G (W-CDMA/FOMA), which appeared in 2001, and "real" 4G standards fulfilling the IMT-Advanced requirements, that were ratified in 2011 and products expected in 2011-2012. Predecessor technologies have occurred on the market a few years before the new mobile generation, for example the pre-3G systemCdmaOne/IS95 in 1995, and the pre-4G systems Mobile WiMAX and LTE in 2005 and 2009 respectively.

The development of the 2G (GSM) and 3G (IMT-2000 and UMTS) standards took about 10 years from the official start of the R&D projects, and development of 4G systems started in 2001 or 2002.^[2][3] However, still no transnational 5G development projects have officially been launched, and industry representatives have expressed scepticism towards 5G.^[4]

New mobile generations are typically assigned new frequency bands and wider spectral bandwidth per frequency channel (1G up to 30 kHz, 2G upto 200 kHz, 3G upto 5 MHz, and 4G upto 40 MHz), but sceptics argue that there is little room for new frequency bands or larger channel bandwidths.^[4] From users point of view, previous mobile generations have implied substantial increase in peak bitrate (i.e. physical layer net bitrates for short-distance communication). However, no source suggests 5G peak download and upload rates of more than the 1 Gbps to be offered by ITU-R's definition of 4G systems.^[2] If 5G appears, and reflects these prognoses, the major difference from a user point of view between 4G and 5G techniques must be something else than increased maximum throughput; for example lower battery consumption, lower outage probability (better coverage), high bit rates in larger portions of the coverage area, cheaper or no traffic fees due to low infrastructure deployment costs, or higher aggregate capacity for many simultaneous users (i.e. higher system level spectral efficiency). Those are the objectives in several of the research papers below.

Research

Key concepts suggested in scientific papers discussing 5G and beyond 4G wireless communications are:

• Pervasive networks providing ubiquitous computing: The user can simultaneously be connected to several wireless access technologies and seamlessly move between them (See Media independent handover or vertical handover, IEEE 802.21, also expected to be provided by future 4G releases. See also multihoming.). These access technologies can be 2.5G, 3G, 4G, or 5G mobile networks, Wi-Fi, WPAN, or any other future access technology. In 5G, the concept may be further developed into multiple concurrent data transfer paths.^[5]
• Group cooperative relay: A major issue in beyond 4G systems is to make the high bit rates available in a larger portion of the cell, especially to users in an exposed position in between several base stations. In current research, this issue is addressed by cellular repeaters and macro-diversity techniques, also known as group cooperative relay, as well as by beam division multiple access.^[6]
• Cognitive radio technology, also known as smart-radio: allowing different radio technologies to share the same spectrum efficiently by adaptively finding unused spectrum and adapting the transmission scheme to the requirements of the technologies currently sharing the spectrum. This dynamic radio resource management is achieved in a distributed fashion, and relies on software-defined radio.^[7][8] See also the IEEE 802.22 standard for Wireless Regional Area Networks.
• Dynamic Adhoc Wireless Networks (DAWN),^[2] essentially identical to Mobile ad hoc network (MANET), Wireless mesh network (WMN) or wireless grids, combined with smart antennas and flexible modulation.
• Vandermonde-subspace frequency division multiplexing (VFDM): a modulation scheme to allow the co-existence of macro-cells and cognitive radio small-cells in a two-tiered LTE/4G network. ^[9].
• IPv6, where a visiting care-of mobile IP address is assigned according to location and connected network.^[5]
• High-altitude stratospheric platform station (HAPS) systems.^[10]
• Wearable devices with AI capabilities.^[2]
• One unified global standard.^[2]
• Real wireless world with no more limitation with access and zone issues.^[5]
• User centric (or cell phone developer initiated) network concept instead of operator-initiated (as in 1G) or system developer initiated (as in 2G, 3G and 4G) standards^[11]
• World wide wireless web (WWWW), i.e. comprehensive wireless-based web applications that include full multimedia capability beyond 4G speeds.^[2]

News

• On July 7, 2008, South Korea announced plans to spend 60 billion won, or US$58 Million, on developing 4G and even 5G technologies, with the goal of having the highest mobile phone market share by 2012, and the hope of an international standard.^[12]

See also

• Femtocell
• Head-mounted display (HMD)
• Picocell
• Ultra-wideband (UWB)
• Virtual retinal display
• Web 2.0
• Web 3.0

Footnotes

1. ^ Xichun Li, Abudulla Gani, Rosli Salleh, Omar Zakaria, The Future of Mobile Wireless Communication Networks, International Conference on Communication Software and Networks, February 2009, ISBN 978-0-7695-3522-7.
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Akhtar, Shakil (August 2008) [2005]. Pagani, Margherita. ed (PDF). 2G-5G Networks: Evolution of Technologies, Standards, and Deployment (Second ed.). Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States: IGI Global. pp. 522–532. doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-014-1.ch070. ISBN 9781605660141. Archived from the original on 2011-06-02. http://www.webcitation.org/5z9JxJryv. Retrieved 2011-06-02. 
3. ^ Emerging Wireless Technologies; A look into the future of wireless communications – beyond 3G, SAFECOM (A U.S. Department of Homeland Security program) "Since the general model of 10 years to develop a new mobile system is being followed, that timeline would suggest 4G should be operational some time around 2011."
4. ^ ^{a b} Interview with Ericsson CTO: There will be no 5g - we have reached the channel limits, Daily News and Analysis, 23 May 2011.
5. ^ ^{a b c} Abdullah Gani, Xichun Li, Lina Yang, Omar Zakaria, Nor Badrul Anuar, Multi-Bandwidth Data Path Design for 5G Wireless Mobile Internets, WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications archive, Volume 6, Issue 2, February 2009. ISSN:1790-0832.
6. ^ The Korean IT R&D program of MKE/IITA: 2008-F-004-01 “5G mobile communication systems based on beam-division multiple access and relays with group cooperation”.
7. ^ Tomorrow's 5g cell phone; Cognitive radio, a 5g device, could forever alter the power balance from wireless service provider to user, Infoworld Newsletters / Networking, February 28, 2003
8. ^ Cornelia-Ionela Badoi, Neeli Prasad, Victor Croitoru and Ramjee Prasad, 5G based cognitive radio, Wireless Personal Communications, Volume 57, Number 3, 441–464, DOI: 10.1007/s11277-010-0082-9, Springer.
9. ^ Leonardo S. Cardoso, Marco Maso, Mari Kobayashi and Mérouane Debbah, Orthogonal LTE two-tier Cellular Networks, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). p. 1-5 , July 2011.
10. ^ Shingo Ohmori, Yasushi Yamao and Nobuo Nakajima, The Future Generations of Mobile Communications Based on Broadband Access Technologies, IEEE communications magazine. Vol. 38, no. 12, p. 134-142, December 2000.
11. ^ Toni Janevski, 5G Mobile Phone Concept, Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2009 6th IEEE [1-4244-2308-2].
12. ^ "Korea to Begin Developing 5G". unwiredview.com. 2008-07-08. http://www.unwiredview.com/2008/07/08/korea-to-start-working-on-5g/. Retrieved 2010-04-08.