At present, the development of 5g is getting better.
After several stages, such as the preheating of 5g concept, the popularization of technology by the whole people caused by Huawei incident, and the issuance of 5g license, it has now entered the stage of intensive development and production equipment in the industrial chain, intensive construction of 5g network by operators, one after another release of 5g Mobile phones by leading terminal manufacturers, and stepping up the development and application of 5g base stations in the communication industry and vertical industry. As of July this year, 3.8 5g base stations have been built nationwide It is estimated that by the end of 2019, the total number of 5g base stations in China will be further increased.
In terms of terminals, 5g terminals are gradually enriched. 5g consumer terminals will still be mainly in the form of smart phones. 5g terminal enterprises, mainly domestic enterprises, have successively released commercial terminals. At present, at least 13 types of commercial terminals have been connected to the network. By the end of 2019, China is expected to open 5g business in a number of cities, and the 5g era is coming to us.
But when any generation of new technology just appeared, it was always accompanied by some doubts, which almost became the law of history. Whether it''s the previous 2G to 3G, 3G to 4G technology upgrading in the field of mobile communication, or the replacement of carriage to car in the field of transportation, new things are often criticized in the early stage. Even though 5g has been repeatedly demonstrated by the industry, we still hear some noises from time to time. In view of some problems of 5g misinformation from the outside world, a reporter from Japan Daily recently interviewed relevant experts from China information and Communication Research Institute (hereinafter referred to as the Institute).
Question 1: 5g is only higher than 4G, and there is no new application scenario?
Experts from ICT Institute believe that compared with 4G, 5g can not only achieve stronger performance, but also has more application scenarios, including enhanced mobile broadband, low latency, high reliability and low power consumption. In order to meet the diverse performance requirements of different application scenarios, 5g adopts different design concepts from 4G. Among them, 5g wireless technology adopts system flexible design, supports multi parameter set, flexible frame structure configuration and scheduling, flexible waveform and other key technologies, and realizes the same hardware platform to meet the requirements of multiple scenarios. 5g core network adopts a new service network architecture, which can develop customized network business processes for different business scenarios, and realize network slicing and edge computing.
Among them, enhanced mobile broadband is the first commercial scenario of 5g. Even in this scenario, the data transmission rate is 10 times higher than 4G, and the delay is less than 4ms, which is nearly three times higher than 10ms of 4G. Due to the improvement of high-speed and low delay performance, 5g can provide better service experience for some mobile broadband applications that 4G cannot meet, such as 4K / 8K high-definition video, 3D video and AR / VR.
Question 2: is 5g difficult to achieve low latency and high reliability?
Experts from the Institute of information and communications think that the first thing to clarify is that the 5g delay 1ms defined in the international standard is not the end-to-end delay, but the delay of the wireless air interface.
In the aspect of 5g low delay, wireless technology mainly adopts wider subcarrier / shorter symbol length, flexible scheduling granularity, self-contained frame structure to realize feedback as soon as possible, optimal transmission scheme when multiple services coexist, etc.; in order to reduce end-to-end service delay, edge computing is one of the effective schemes, which sinks service information or information processing to the nearest location from the terminal Edge computing has been successfully applied in IOT solutions.
In the aspect of 5g high reliability, 5g designs higher level control channel, defines special level, reduces control information load, repeats traffic channel transmission, supports data diversity transmission and so on, in order to achieve high reliability under low delay.
Through the above technical solutions, 5g system has supported industrial automation, power distribution and other IOT application scenarios. Taking industrial automation as an example, when 5g supports data load of 32 bytes, air port delay is less than 1ms, end-to-end delay is less than 2ms, and the reliability meets 99.9999%.
Question 3: is 5g core network architecture and protocol too complex?
Experts from the Institute of information and communications think that in terms of 5g core network architecture, 5g network adopts service-oriented architecture (SBA), which rationalizes and reorganizes the logical functions of the core network (modularization). Although it seems that there are more functional entities and the interaction between network elements is more complex, in fact, the network with service-oriented architecture is easier to realize flexible customization, on-demand tailoring and simplified deployment In terms of interface protocol, the service interface of 5g network architecture adopts the normalized protocol stack (HTTP / JSON), which is in line with the development trend of information and communication technology. It unifies a variety of 4G protocols and greatly simplifies the protocol complexity.
5g core network architecture and protocol have been basically stable. At present, the core network products of major 5g enterprises have been developed and tested. Of course, due to the more flexible definition of the new it protocol structure, different manufacturers have different understandings at the initial stage, and it will take some time for interconnection, but it will not affect the commercial deployment of 5g core network.
Question 4: is the cost of 5g equipment and network construction too high?
Experts from the Institute of information technology said that 5g can achieve more than 10 times 4G performance, and stronger performance also means higher equipment cost. Taking a typical 5g macro base station as an example, with large-scale antenna technology, the number of equipment channels has increased from 8 channels of 4G to 32 / 64 channels, the complexity of software and hardware processing has increased significantly, and the number and performance specifications of digital and RF devices have also been greatly improved, which is estimated in the initial stage The total cost is about 2-3 times of 4G equipment. But with the gradual maturity of 5g industry and the scale of network construction, the price of equipment will be reduced.
At the same time, China''s 5g commercial initial stage will mainly carry out network deployment in the medium frequency band. After road loss compensation through large-scale antenna and other technologies, 5g intermediate frequency band coverage is not very different from 4G. It is estimated that the number of 5g intermediate frequency band base stations is about 1.5 times of 4G.
In general, the increase of base station scale and the cost of single station will increase the construction cost of 5g network. According to the prediction of China Mobile, it is about twice the investment of 4G network. At present, manufacturing enterprises continue to strive to enhance 5g product performance and reduce costs. At the same time, operators can also reduce the cost of network construction through network co construction and sharing, accelerate the pace of 5g business, and realize 5g scale business as soon as possible.
In addition, we are glad to see that the price of 5g terminals is falling faster than expected, which makes more users enjoy 5g services soon.
Question 5: the current 5g can only provide mobile enhanced broadband services, but it does not seem to have the ability to realize the low time delay and high reliability scenario of Internet of things?
Experts from the Institute of information technology said that some people think that 5g was originally designed for three scenarios, but now only one scenario is implemented to enhance mobile broadband, which is inconsistent with 5g vision design. We should know that 5g technology standards and industrial development is a gradual process, and 5g technology can ensure the expansion of multiple scenarios under a unified technology architecture.
In June 2018, the first version of 5g standard completed the enhanced mobile broadband scenario, and in March 2020, the second version of 5g standard will complete the low latency and high reliability scenario. 5g products will be provided within 1-2 years after freezing 5g standard. 5g technology will continue to enhance performance and expand application scenarios in its ten-year life cycle.