5G Document Folder

33 | Ecosystems of 5G Engineering: Infrastructure By Barry Manz for Mouser Electronics The fifth generation (5G) of what used to be called cellular radio is like none before it. It encompasses not just smartphones and tablets but almost everything that can benefit from being connected to other things and the Internet. For the first time, connecting businesses is as important as connecting consumers, and while mobility remains the core focus of the 5G operating environment, 5G will also serve many fixed applications. Whether catering to mobile or fixed applications, the 5G infrastructure will still need base stations—orders of magnitude more of them, in fact, than currently exist—but deploying these base stations may be the most challenging task in developing a complete 5G ecosystem. Virtualization The impact of 5G on the current wireless infrastructure affects all three major use cases: Traditional mobile, called enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB); massive machine- type communications (mMTC) Internet of Things (IoT) environments; and the newest and most demanding use case, ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Serving all three of these use cases requires a change from a hardware-based network architecture to one that's virtual and based on network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN), processing and analytics at the network's edge, network slicing, and other technologies new to the wireless infrastructure. The transition from hardware- to software-based (i.e., virtual) networks affects base stations of all sizes. The two "virtualizers" of this new paradigm—NFV and SDN— perform similar functions because they provide far greater network control using less hardware, thus reducing or eliminating changes to hardware as the network evolves. The capacity of these virtualizers also means less hardware may be necessary. Network Virtualization Using the Digital Domain The benefits of network virtualization are now being realized as virtualization empowers software to perform functions in the digital domain rather than through analog and digital hardware, as has been the case before. Still, this shift to virtualization will quite obviously require substantial computational resources, a point that has not been overlooked by Arm Limited (Arm ® ), an organization best known for its architectural designs for smartphones, network processors, and embedded processors. Arm's first computing ecosystems tailored exclusively for servers and infrastructure design are the Neoverse™ series of processors. Each processor in the series includes not just a central processing unit (CPU) core but an interconnected scheme, making it possible to scale up to many cores. Neoverse processors will likely find a home at the network's edge, where high-performance computing is increasingly becoming necessary. These processors are also well suited for 5G base stations, which will ultimately handle much more data than 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks but with greater DC power constraints. Toward Higher Spectral Efficiency An entirely different approach will be required for the technology dedicated to generating and receiving signals Barry Manz is president of Manz Communications, Inc., a technical media relations agency he founded in 1987. He has since worked with more than 100 companies in the radio frequency (RF) and microwave, defense, test and measurement, semiconductor, embedded systems, lightwave, and other markets. "...connecting businesses is as important as connecting consumers..." 5G promises to allow everything that would benefit from connectivity to achieve it, and that require massive infrastructure. (Source: Getty Images) [ C O N T ' D O N N E X T P A G E ]

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