Flexible Air iNTerfAce for Scalable service delivery wiThin wIreless Communication networks of the 5th Generation. Years 2015-2017 (24 months).

5G-PPP Project on 5G Air Interface Below 6 GHz

The next generation (5G) celluar technology is expected to arrive in 2020. There are four trends indicating the need for a new generation of celluar technology including new air interfaces

• Efficiency in terms of resource utilization (e.g. energy, spectrum) is becoming more and more pronounced. It is seen as an indispensable ingredient for a healthy/sustainable (1) ICT market/business and (2) environment
• The demand for wireless data is predicted to increase significantly, resulting in 1000x higher mobile data volumes and 10-100x higher end user data rates.
• The number of connected devices is predicted to increase by a factor of 10-100, which means that up to 300,000 devices need to be served per access point.
• Wireless connetivity will be applied to new use cases that require very reliable connections and mission-critical communication, such as vehicle-to-vehicle coordination, critical control of the power grid, etc.
• Remote presence and tactile Internet that impose stringent latency constraints on the overall connection, including the wireless part of it. Forecasts imply that the latency should be decreased for a factor of 5 in order to enable such services.

The air interfaces for 2G, 3G and 4G were all designed for specific use cases (limited only to voice and data comuncations) with a certain number of limited KPIs in mind (throughput, capacity, dropped/blocked call rates, etc.). However, as outlined above, 5G required the support of a much broader class of services and consequently a very diverse family of devices an traffic characteristics.

With 4G being currently massively rolled-out, it becomes apparent, that while it is very well suited to serve the wireless communication need of today, it will quickly reach its limits. This is obvious due to the following observable trends:

• Mobile BroadBand (MBB)
• Massive Machine Communications
• Mission Critical Communications
• Broadcast / Multicast Services
• Vehicle-to-infrastructure and Vehicle-to-Vehicle

Detailed information is available in the FANTASTIC-5G EuCNC 2015 paper.

For more info, please visit dedicated website.