Few have any idea what 5G standards will include, but virtualization will certainly be a key element, and that should open the doors to the RAN fortress for companies from the enterprise world.
Chih Lin I, chief scientist of wireless technologies at China Mobile, the great champion of Cloud-RAN, gave several of them a hefty name-drop at this week’s ‘5G Huddle’, a London event run by WWRF and techUK. She outlined a network in which the same standard servers hosted applications and base stations together, removing the vendors’ old models based on vertically integrated hardware and software.
“If you have 10,000 basestations intelligently located in one place and the site is left with the radio head that you can dynamically configure, it will bring in lots of IT players. Our partners included Intel and at one point included IBM. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cisco is in soon,” she commented, though she also left grains of hope for the traditional suppliers. “Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent still know the whole system the best, and that expertise is hard to reproduce. It’s better that we all evolve together.”
Like many of her peers, the scientist believes that 5G will not be a step change, but the coming-together of many innovations and technologies, over a long period of time. There is a “string of pearls for 5G”, as she put it – areas which need to be fundamentally rethought, moving away from the classic cellular concepts which still underpin 4G. These are the cellular design itself, the signalling control (which needs to be optimized for apps), antennas, infrastructure and spectrum.
She added: “What we call 5G should be renamed 5G Era because that is a wide sense of 5G. In the past we talked about 1G, 2G, 3G and 4G in a quite narrow sense of next generation mobile standards that is defined by standards bodies such as 3GPP. But going forward the collective 5G vision all of us have I think should be properly renamed 5G Era vision.”
Meanwhile, the almost weekly procession of new 5G labs and research efforts sees Vodafone announcing an alliance with Dresden University of Technology in Germany. The R&D initiative will bring together academics, developers and technology companies to explore the capabilities of 5G and establish technical guidelines for its development, said the operator, and will be part of its global program.
Professor Gerhard Fettweis, who occupies the Vodafone chair of mobile communications systems at Dresden, said in a statement: “Today, mobile communications is all about moving content from one place to another. Tomorrow it will be about being able to control a vast array of objects in real time with little human intervention. To get there we need to rethink wireless communications, particularly with regard to data rates, latency and IP services.”