IEEE Communications Magazine • February 2014
140
0163-6804/14/$25.00 © 2014 IEEE
MOTIVATION
Life without modern wireless communications,
as it existed before 1990, is now difficult to imag-
ine. It empowers our modern life, enables mod-
ern societies to operate efficiently, and has had a
major impact on modern politics, economy, edu-
cation, health, entertainment, logistics, travel,
and all industries.
In order to have a productive life, we need to
obtain and share information from various
sources. Thankfully, most of the information and
data known to mankind has been digitized in
one form or another, and is available for con-
sumption and sharing. Hence, we require reli-
able and fast data communications for real-time
access and sharing of this information, which is
stored and consumed in various formats and
structures (text, image, audio, and video).
First and second generation mobile communi-
cations networks were dominated by analog and
then digital audio signals and text messaging. The
third generation was more about scaling the num-
ber of users on the network for voice communica-
tions and text messaging, but was overwhelmed by
an unpredictable tsunami of image and video con-
tent. This trend is sure to continue. Video, audio,
and image formats are going to become richer
and will require even more data, most probably
beyond improvements in codec technologies.
Therefore, the thirst for data communications is
going to continue, and our transmission networks
will most probably remain the bottleneck. Hence,
we need to provide as much capacity as we can,
and ensure that we build an efficient and smart
architecture that can accommodate future
demands for data communications.
Moreover, the landscape of information has
expanded greatly in the area of machines. There
are many new gadgets and devices (hereby
referred to as machines) that are potential sources
of valuable information. Thanks to advances in
communications technology, machines can be
connected and reached cost effectively and will
fast become an integral part of the global infor-
mation network. This will definitely drive an ever
increasing demand for monitoring and sensing
data and applications. The nature of most of this
data will be different than conventional human
generated content, and will mostly be short,
bursty, and asynchronous. Nevertheless, the num-
ber of these devices will be orders of magnitude
larger than the conventional communications
devices of today. Hence, we need to architect our
networks to handle tens of billions of devices
growing rapidly, limited only by the capabilities
and capacities of our networks.
Beyond our need for communication and shar-
ing is the need to steer/control elements of our
surroundings and environment, as gadgets, sen-
sors, and machines help us carry out our day-to-
day life more efficiently. Once machines become
connected, the next natural leap is to have them
controlled remotely. This will generate a com-
pletely new paradigm for control communications.
Today we enjoy the power of telephony and
data communications. Our fourth generation
(4G) networks enable real-time access to richer
content and enable early application of machine
type communication, while control communica-
tions is in its infancy. This article provides a re -
collection of our current state to motivate and
sketch a vision of our future.
The mobile industry has had a chronology of
revolutionary applications and technologies that
have shaped the daily lives of their customers.
First and foremost, the need for untethered tele-
phony, and therefore real-time wireless communi-
cations, dominated the success of cordless phones,
followed by cellular communications. Soon there-
after, two-way paging implemented by text mes-
saging became another killer application. With
the success of wireless LAN technology (WiFi
based on the IEEE 802.11 standard), Internet
browsing, and the widespread market adoption of
laptop computers, untethered Internet data con-
ABSTRACT
Cellular technology has dramatically changed
our society and the way we communicate. First it
impacted voice telephony, and then has been
making inroads into data access, applications,
and services. However, today potential capabili-
ties of the Internet have not yet been fully
exploited by cellular systems. With the advent of
5G we will have the opportunity to leapfrog
beyond current Internet capabilities.
5G WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS:
PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES
Gerhard Fettweis, TU Dresden
Siavash Alamouti
5G: Personal Mobile Internet beyond
What Cellular Did to Telephony
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