Abstract: What are the key technologies of 5G communication? What new technologies and changes does 5G bring to the mobile Internet scene and the Internet of Things scene?

This article is from huawei Cloud community “KEY Technology interpretation of 5G Communication”, author: Super. Vivian.

As the latest generation of cellular communication technology, 5G has been attracting a lot of attention. In addition to their 5G mobile phone terminals being launched on the market, the application scenarios have also expanded from mobile Internet business to Internet of Things. So what are the key technologies for 5G communication? What new technologies and changes does 5G bring to the mobile Internet scene and the Internet of Things scene?

5G standard evolution and industrial development

In the past decade, operators and suppliers have issued digital and intelligent transformation strategies, and with the rapid deployment of 5G, society has taken a more solid step towards a fully connected, fully aware and fully intelligent society. Looking into the future from today, 2025 will be a very important time point. According to Vision25, by 2025:

  • Smart home: 14% of the world’s households will have household intelligent robots;

  • AR/VR vision: global VR/AR users will reach 3.7 billion, the number of enterprises using VR/AR technology will increase to 10%;

  • Intelligent manufacturing: 103 robots for every 10,000 manufacturing employees;

  • AI: 97% of large enterprises will adopt AI, and human-machine co-creation will be ubiquitous to create more value.

Behind these changes is the rapid deployment of 5G, with 6.5 million base stations set to be deployed globally by 2025, serving 2.8 billion users. If you can sum up what these different industries are trying to achieve in three words, they are everything aware, everything connected and everything intelligent.

A very important factor for the society to achieve these goals will be the rapid deployment of 5G. Accelerating the deployment of 5G can help quickly achieve the landing of these industry goals.

Figure – Standard evolution

The formulation of 5G standards can be traced back to R15 in 17. The main standards of 5G were formulated in R15, including the technical framework of wireless, the coding of physical layer, the architecture of multi-antenna system and network. To R16 is equivalent to the standard of 5G is once again perfect and enhanced, so R16 is the complete version of 5G.

However, the 5G standard started from Release15. Here, the evolution of 5G technology can be divided into two parts. The first part is the evolution of LTE, from the initial lte-advanced to lte-advanced pro, which is known as 4.5g in the industry, and then to 5G. The other part is the new technology of 5G. To sum up, the STANDARD of 5G starts from R15, and the new technical standard of 5G includes two parts, including LTE AdvancedPro evolution and EPC evolution. Another part of 5G new technology includes 5G new air port and 5G new generation core network.

Another advantage of 5G is that it has unified global standards. In the 3G era, there are three common standards in China. The three major operators in China have different standards: CDMA2000 for China Telecom, WCDMA for China Unicom and TD-SCDMA for China Mobile. What’s the problem with that? When buying a mobile phone, users should pay attention to which company SIM card they use, because the networks between different carriers are incompatible.

So this point is a more troublesome thing for users. Of course, customers will see full netcom and non-full Netcom versions when they buy a phone. A non-full Netcom phone will be a carrier’s custom phone, which will be cheaper than a non-custom phone, but it won’t work on other carrier networks.

In the 4G era, there are also two standards, one is TD-LTE and the other is FDD-LTE. In order to solve such a multi-standard mess, 5G is stipulated, and then there will be only one standard in the world. In this way, users around the world will be more convenient in mobile communication.

Figure – National strategy

On a national level, how important is 5G? As can be seen from the graph, many countries have realized the benefits 5G can bring to the country. Many countries have put 5G and AI at the core of their national digital development strategies.

According to statistics, the most effective way to stimulate GDP growth is to increase investment in ICT technology, and Huawei research shows that 20% ICT investment will bring 1% GDP growth to the country. From the perspective of investment efficiency ratio, the efficiency and benefit of investment in ICT technology are very high. So many countries have realized the importance of 5G and AI and taken it as an important strategy for national development. It can be seen that the construction of 5G is not only the work of operators, but also the necessary work of national construction.

In terms of 5G network deployment, in the first half of 2018, there were only 5 5G networks in the world, but in the second half of 2018, there were 30. So the speed of 5G network deployment is very fast. By the end of 2019, there were 130,000 5G base stations in China, and many cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have achieved 5G connectivity. Therefore, the country and even the world attach great importance to the development of 5G.

When you have A 5G network, you have to have products that go with it. In February 2018, Huawei released to the world the first 5G commercial chip Balong 5G01 and huawei 5GCPE, a commercial terminal based on this chip. The measured downlink rate of this terminal can reach 2Gbps. When it arrived, Huawei also unveiled MateX, a 5G foldable phone with the chip. Since then, Huawei has integrated 5G modules into systems on chips, introduced chips such as kirin 980 and Kirin 990, and the latest 5G phone, the HuaweiMate40

Introduction to 5G key technologies

Key performance indicators of 5G are the capabilities required for the three SCENARIOS of 5G mentioned above: 1-millisecond delay, 10Gbps speed, one million connections per square kilometer, and the network architecture of slicing. Details about network slicing will be introduced later in this section.

The new architecture

The key technologies of 5G can be divided into three key innovations, which are new architecture, new air port and full spectrum. Next, this paper will analyze the above three technological innovations one by one. The first is the new architecture of 5G. The 5G network is a network that carries thousands of industries. In 5G network, the actual application scenarios are complex and changeable, and some application scenarios have diverse requirements for network, which requires operators to combine requirements such as delay and bandwidth to form multiple slices with different capabilities. So if you’re going to slice, you’re going to have to have a flexible network.

1. Network slicing

First among the 5 g core network USES NFV (NetworkFunctionVirtualization) technology, NFV: virtualization, the function of network by using the general hardware such as x86 and virtualization technologies, to carry a lot of function of the software. Thus reducing the network expensive equipment cost. The software and hardware decoupling and function abstraction enable network device functions not to depend on dedicated hardware, and resources can be flexibly shared to realize rapid development and deployment of new services, and implement automatic deployment, elastic scaling, fault isolation, and self-healing based on actual service requirements.

Generally speaking, the functions of network devices are no longer limited by hardware. For example, in the past, memory is memory and CPU is CPU. After buying these hardware, users can only use this much, but they usually buy a lot more resources to ensure sufficient resources. In this case, it is easy to waste resources, because so many resources are not needed in the normal use process. The virtualization architecture is free of these hardware constraints, it can divide the same hardware into many different users to use, it is a flexible architecture, you use as much as you want, the rest can be used by others.

Such a network can handle different services according to the needs of sharding. SoftwareDefinedNetwork (SDN) is the same. SoftwareDefinedNetwork (SDN) defines a network using software to create a more intelligent and flexible network. Its core technology, OpenFlow, by separating the control surface of network equipment from the data surface, realizes the flexible control of network traffic, makes the network become more intelligent as a pipeline, and provides a good platform for the innovation of core network and application.

This shows the application of network slicing technology in 5G network. It virtualizes multiple end-to-end networks based on a common hardware by slicing technology. Each network has different network functions and meets different types of service requirements.

2. NSA&SA networking mode

Figure – Networking mode

The 5G network can be classified into two types: NSA and SA. As can be seen from the figure, NSA’s architecture is mainly composed of EPC, eNodeB, and gNodeB. In this architecture, 4G and 5G base stations are controlled by the CORE 4G network. However, SA networking mode is different. It is mainly composed of four parts: eNodeB, gNodeB, EPC and NGC.

The difference between these two networking modes may not be easy for readers to understand, but a simple example can be used to illustrate. Let’s say you’re a restaurant owner, and you have a restaurant front called Door 4, and you hire a chef called Chef 4. As business gets better and the restaurant is full, you want to expand your business, but because expanding requires a lot of money, you can’t invest blindly. So you choose two plans. Plan A is to buy another store named Storefront 5 and add A chef named Chef 5. This plan is the simplest and most direct, but it costs the most money. There is another plan. Plan B is to buy another storefront called Storefront 5, but instead of hiring a chef, chef 4 will take care of the two stores. This approach, while economical, is cumbersome and may overwhelm Chef 4.

In the above two schemes, scheme A and independent network SA are the same. The two facades are equivalent to 4G and 5G base stations, and the chef inside is equivalent to the core network. What about plan B, which is the same as the NSA for non-independent networking. The fundamental difference between these two networking modes is the same as that of the hotel example, but it comes down to money.

With enough money, it’s easy to have a pure, perfect 5G network, as long as all the equipment is built at the same time, on a separate network, completely separate from 4G. However, not all operators are rich. In order to facilitate users to gradually enjoy 5G, 3GPP proposed the independent network, which is equivalent to providing operators with two different levels of packages.

3. 5G core network NGC

5G core network has four technical features:

First of all, what is the advantage of controlling load separation? It is important to know the difference between the control side, which is responsible for transmitting control signaling, and the user side, which transmits the data actually used by the user. When the control surface is separated from the user surface, so that when the operator is in software management, upgrade, which side of the problem will be dealt with which side, this way is simple, convenient a lot.

Second, mobile edge computing, mobile edge computing is a cloud server that runs on the edge of a mobile network, running a specific task. Its main function is to hand over part of the core network business to the cloud server room at the edge of the mobile network. By doing so, you can effectively reduce the time it takes to travel back and forth across the network, which can effectively reduce latency and bandwidth usage.

Thirdly, network function reconstruction, this point is very easy to understand, because the network is put in the cloud for computing, and the network architecture and functions of all parts have been replanned, so it is characterized by function reconstruction.

Fourth, network slicing, which was also mentioned above, is an end-to-end network, which is a very elastic network. It makes an end-to-end partition based on specific requirements.

New hollow

This part of the new air port involves the knowledge of the physical layer, which will not be explained too much in this course. Therefore, if readers want to understand this part of the knowledge in detail, they can continue to learn 5G courses. In the Course on the Internet of Things, readers need only be aware of the new air port technologies used by 5G: full duplex, MassiveMIMO, Polar coding, F-OFDM and SCMA. Among them, MassiveMIMO will use multi-antenna as receiving end and sending end, and in the time domain and frequency domain, multiplexing technology is also used in space, in order to improve throughput.

Full spectrum

As mentioned above, the 3G band is 1800M and 4G band is 2600M. 5G jumps straight to the C band, which is 3.4-3.6GHz. Although the frequency band used by 4G is not low, 2600 megabytes is 2.6 gigabytes. However, it can still reach a range of about two kilometers by amplifying signals from base stations. But 5G is not. In addition to THE C band, there are millimeter waves above the band, that is, the part above 6GHz. So what is the biggest problem of 5G? One is that it consumes a lot of energy, and the other is that its coverage and penetration are too weak.

Therefore, for 5G, the FREQUENCY band C is relatively low compared with millimeter wave, so it will be used in the comprehensive coverage of base station, that is, the frequency band used outside the 5G base station built by operators is in this part. The rest of the spectrum will then be used for capacity and auto-transmission. About capacity, for example, such as transport hubs, stadium, indoor area is large, the population density and the obstacle less places, sometimes people more cases, ordinary C spectrum due to the limited area covered by the base station, each base station can carry the number of users is limited, so it is easy to occur rate lower, suggesting that the number of users is overmuch, the base station Speed can only be sacrificed to ensure that every user can access the network. At this time, it is necessary to use a small base station in the frequency band of more than 6GHz for capacity expansion, because high-frequency signals are relatively reflective despite their poor penetration, so they are more suitable for use in these scenarios.

About self-return, in the current home network, such as optical fiber to the home, it uses the wired way to connect the optical fiber line to the community. After that, carriers will use wireless methods, such as the CPE mentioned above, to carry out wireless back transmission. On the one hand, it can be used as a base station to provide services for terminals. On the other hand, it can replace optical fiber to achieve wireless self-transmission, also known as FWA, fixedwirelessaccess, which will be discussed in the next section. Therefore, the deployment mode of 5G is the hybrid networking mode of high and low frequency. It aggregates all frequency bands and spectrum, and uses different frequency bands in different directions to achieve better effects of 5G.

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