Huge Challenges Loom in Move to 5G, IEEE Conference Told
Building 5G networks poses huge challenges that are still being addressed, said Debabani Choudhury, Intel Labs principal scientist, at an IEEE seminar on 5G Friday, streamed from Hawaii. High-frequency spectrum, starting with the 28 and 39 GHz bands, must play a “big role” to get the capacity that's needed, she said.
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Using millimeter wave spectrum, the design of beamforming systems, the antennas and the transceivers that will be used -- all are complicated, Choudhury said. “We need to really look at the design of the whole system, starting at the device to the network level,” she said. New systems can use very narrow beams, but if you want broad coverage, there can’t be any blind spots, she said.
The devices need to be designed with care, Choudhury said. “If the material is not good, it will introduce very high loss and your platform will be degraded,” she said. There are “a lot of challenges for designers,” she said. The evaluation of the materials that will be used in the new networks will take “lots of effort and we need to be careful how we do that,” she said.
Autonomous vehicles, connected cars, connected healthcare and other “exploding applications” will require very high speed connections, though each has different needs, Choudhury said. Healthcare and autonomous vehicles require low latency and high reliability, she said. An IoT of billions of devices will require longer battery life and huge network capacity, all at low cost, she said. Mobile communications will make other demands, she said. “All these issues have to work together and all these diverse needs to be addressed together,” she said.
Fifth-generation networks will help industry meet a very challenging demand -- high-speed broadband everywhere, said Javan Erfanian, distinguished member of technology, Bell Canada. Providing 50-100 MB connections everywhere is in many ways more difficult than providing multi-GBs connections in fewer locations, he said. A massive IoT will also impose huge new requirements on networks, he said. “We must provide an environment where the network can virtually transform itself to what may be needed by an application,” he said.
Erfanian said 5G is about the future. “We are positioned, in a way, for the needs of the next decade,” he said. “You can tell from the mobile data, from the capacity needs, from the mobile and connected society, the response we need to have.” Network densification will be critical, Erfanian said. “This is not just about wireless end-to-end,” he said. “A lot of the discussion … is about wired, particularly about fiber.” Carriers are making big investments in fiber to support 5G, he said. “It’s all about the context, what are the requirements, how tight they are,” he said.