INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
5G INNOVATION CENTRE
6 | P a g e
localisation and flattening of content to the edge but few decisions or requirements are published at
this stage. This paper proposes that this kind of work is taken much further in order to create a
content environment that meets the delay and latency targets that 5G communications systems are
seeking to achieve.
Current global content players include Akamai, Google, iPlayer and YouTube, from producers Netflix,
BBC, Sky and others. Most of the video content that is distributed over today’s end-user
communications networks has a common 10% that most people download and then a very long
tailed type/tag based variability in the remaining 90% of available content thus making it difficult for
mobile operators to operate local content caching to any notably useful degree. [e.g.: Ref-12]
Content Centric Networking (CCN) and Information Centric Networking (ICN) techniques are
common in the academic literature, but practical approaches for implementation are less well
developed, for instance in terms of i) a new system for advertising content by content ID ii) realising
cheap content control at mobile nodes, iii) integrating a standard content control protocol that
works well with mobile control protocols. What is needed for content control is an architecture that
inherently supports mobile content control and enables developers to build the practical content
control functions that are needed to make it commercial. The FDC separates out traditional Control
plane and User Plane but also adds a User Plane Control protocol to do this.
Quality of Service (QoS)
Previous attempts to add QoS controls to a mobile network have been elaborate by design, painful
in equipment design and implementation and unfortunately then have proved largely irrelevant or
unused in operation. This has been largely because QoS controls have been seen as either too
complex or insufficiently supported on an ETE basis to be workable. The IETF have been slightly
more successful in their Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) approach although once again a
small subset of controls is actually operated in most cases. 3GPP have four generations of
experience in setting QoS for mobile networks, but provision and exposure of QoS controls to the
device/application has proved poor. So it is proposed here that for 5G, each communications
‘request’ is made more descriptive of the request type, content and performance requires and the
network selects the best available QoS controls in the network accordingly.
IoT
The Internet of Things represents the networking of sensor and actuator devices to the internet for
improved discoverability, connectivity, for metering, measurement and monitoring applications and
to ultimately enable support for control systems applications to manage these devices. However,
public communications today is usually too expensive and slow reacting to effect much more than
simple metering support and it does not currently support high end IoT systems for control loops.
Current generations of wireless cellular communication systems remain unsuited for SCADA-like
control systems because their response time is currently too slow. Note that SCADA-like control
systems include IoT based systems for utility distribution and in the future would include Auto-Drive
control loops.
The 5G Vision
The 5GIC vision document [Ref-06] sets out an ambitious goal of enabling a world where services are
provided wirelessly to the end device by a fixed and mobile (converged) infrastructure that functions
across the whole geography, including indoors and outdoors, dense urban centres with capacity
challenges, sparse rural locations where coverage is the main challenge, places with existing
infrastructure, and also where there is none. The foremost requirement is that the 5G infrastructure
should be far more demand/user/device centric with the agility to marshal network/spectrum
resources to deliver “always sufficient” data rate and minimal user plane (UP) latency (subject to