Fifth generation (5G) cellular wireless: Vision, goals, and challenges

Cellular wireless or mobile communications have seen four generations of technological developments. Starting with analog voice with the first, and then moving on to digital voice with the second generation, these generations were each marked with a clear technological advancement. For the third generation, the advancement was in incorporating data on top of a voice-based infrastructure. With the fourth generation, every service was converted into data format, or packetized transmissions, including voice and video. Today, technologists are proposing a fifth generation for around the time frame of 2020. Most consider this time to be when the infrastructure will need to be renewed. Together with this observation, it is usually argued that the new generation technology should possess a number of features. Yet, there is really no consensus on what these new features should be. Some argue that we are facing a new generation of devices that will have continuous Internet connectivity, and with that there will be more machine to-machine or machine-type communications. It is further argued that, as a result, new communication protocols should be able to support the new formats of communication that this change will require. For example, it is argued that machine-type communication will require very low latency. Others argue that the demand for services will increase by about three orders of magnitude and the new technology should be designed to support this tremendous increase, perhaps handling each order of magnitude by means of a different approach. Yet, there are others who argue that the current communications infrastructure is highly energy-inefficient and the fifth generation should be designed to solve this problem, by increasing energy efficiency by several orders of magnitude. In this talk, we will discuss the pros and cons of the approaches for defining and realizing the fifth generation cellular wireless technologies as seen today. We will discuss what fifth generation can be expected to be and, more importantly, what it cannot be. The goal in this presentation is to address both the very high expectations and the realities.