What is 5G Technology?

There is a famous proverb in English that “Necessity is the mother of Invention”. So in order to understand that what could be the next generation technology, we have to first understand that where the current network is being failed or what type of challenges it is facing currently.

There should be some estimation in the form of stats that tells us that what will be the scenario in 2020. Then only will we find the requirements which we want from the next generation network to fulfill. Anyways, According to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) these are some of the requirements which world want from the wireless domain to fulfill it by 2020.

• Supports up to 1000 times more traffic: Yes there is an estimation that when we will enter in 2020 the traffic would be increase up to 1000 times more. This traffic includes crowd not only from mobile data but also from different sources. As we know that the number of connected device with Internet is quite large (more than 1 Billion). So it is expected that it will increase more & more. As electronics industries are making efforts to bring IOT & Virtual Reality into our daily life. So there will be exponential growth in the number of connected devices with Internet which will result into high traffic.
• Low Latency: Network Latency is basically kind of delay that happens in data communication over a network. It is a time taken by the network to transmit the data packet from one destination to another. It should be quite minimum. As we are moving towards the Driverless cars/Autonomous Cars so particular in these fields 25ms of latency could be significant. It should be as minimum as possible.

There are also some requirements like Gbps Peak speed, Apps bandwidth demand and many more. You can see this from the above figure. Now i will discuss here about the one of the most Important requirement & that is effective Utilization of Spectrum.

Effective Utilization of Spectrum:

Now as our expectation from the next Generation network is quite high. So for that we must have an idea that how we can utilized the most of the spectrum part. And if we will be able in doing so then we will surely meet with our requirements. So here i will discuss two approach and by using that effective utilization of spectrum is possible.

Cognitive Radio- The new 5G radio:

Cognitive radio is an intelligent radio and adaptive network technology that automatically detects available channels in a wireless spectrum and change transmission parameters enabling more communications to run concurrently and optimizes radio’s operating behavior.

To understand the cognitive radio see this image:

In the left part of Image we can see that in the mobile spectrum part number of users is quite high while in other spectrum's number of users are quite less. This is the current situation of wireless world. As we all know that we have different frequency spectrum for different purposes like for mobile communication we have different band, for television we have different band and for radio we have different band. Now what cognitive radio suggests is that why not we should assign the vacant spectrum part to the users who are in crowded spectrum as per ttheir demand. So cognitive radio basically sense that which part of spectrum is not being utilized and then by using frequency synthesize it just switch the primary users into the other spectrum where they will be known as secondary users. (Primary user and secondary user these terms are basically defined by FCC . Primary users are those users who have a license to use their spectrum while secondary users are those users who does’t have any license to use that particular spectrum part.) So in this way cognitive radio can solve the crisis of spectrum.

Actually cognitive radio is quite big topic in itself. I will cover it in my next post. Where i will simply describe its working and other terms related to it.

Li-Fi (Light Fidelity):

• The term Li-Fi was coined by University of Edinburgh Professor Harald Haas during a TED Talk in 2011. Haas envisioned light bulbs that could act as wireless routers.
• Li-Fi can be thought of as a light based Wi-Fi. That is, it uses light Instead of radio waves to transmit Information.
• Li-Fi is ideal for high density wireless data coverage in confined area and for relieving radio interference issues.

There are so many advantages of using Li-Fi in future. Some of them are:

• Speed(>10 GBPS)
• Cheaper Cost
• Visible light has 10000x more spectrum.
• More secure data transfer.
• No license needed.
• It can be used in airlines too for data.
• can be used in Hospital & Healthcare.

Now the question comes here is that how Li-Fi works. So the answer of this question is here:

So this is how effective utilization of spectrum is Possible.

Source:

Internet, My Presentation