5G OutlookA REPORT ON PIMRC ’2013

BY: RAMIN VALI

Background

• PIMRC is a Flagship IEEE Conference on Telecommunication

• It has a long history of showing the horizon for upcoming telecommunications technologies

• Hosted by King’s College London

Main Players

• Operators were represented by Vodafone in the form of Steve Pusey (Vodafone Group CTO), and Siavash Alamouti (Head of Vodafone Group R&D)

• Vendors were represented by the heads of Huawei and nsnResearch Divisions.

• The regulatory bodies were represented by Ofcom UK.

• There were many academics from leading universities in the telecommunication field.

Vision for the Future

• The Operators feel the need to have a consistent service in terms of data speed across their whole network.

• There needs to be a way to evolve faster in response to the complexity of cellular networks today.

• There needs to be some form of intelligent offload for unpredictable user behaviour (when many people gather in one place unexpectedly).

• There will be a day that the operators have to share each other's spectrum the same way they share the infrastructure. Handling that properly is very important.

The Vision for 5G

• No one has got much technical data on it yet.

• There is the talk of 1000 times capacity. Not sure if it is achievable on scale.

• Probably there won’t be a new RAT, most probably the aim will be on making all the existing technologies work seamlessly together (FDD-LTE, LTEA, TDD-LTE, 3G, WiFi offload)

• Using a cloud structure for the network with all optical backbone.

The slides I stole from various presentations

5G Vision

• The EU is very keen on PPP (Public Private Partnership) to drive research.

• They envisage a zero perceived downtime for internet in 2020. (that means a lot of redundancy as well as integration of all access technologies).

The slides I stole from various presentations

The vision for 5G as presented by nsn (Nokia Solutions and Networks)

The Challenges for 5G

What does the EU think and how much money are they sinking into it? Their roadmap is called H2020.

How do they intend to spend that research money?

Food for Thought.

• What does this mean for us in NZ?

• How will our local providers cope with these changes?

• Do we have the infrastructure and the quality of service now to deliver say 3Mbps consistently across our coverage domain regardless of load?)

• How do we go ahead making sure that the main point of mobile communication (Voice Communication) is not forgotten?

• Will LTE or future evolutions be dependant on 2G/3G fall back for their voice?