5G Affected by Larger Societal Trends, Will Need Years of Work: IEEE Experts

IEEE is taking a broad view of how 5G and the path to 6G are affected by broader trends in its International Network Generations Roadmap (INGR), speakers said during an IEEE webinar Wednesday. The program featured leaders of several of the working groups developing the road map. Experts agreed there are no easy answers and the challenges will require years of work to resolve.

The road to 6G “is a journey,” said GlobeNet principal Narendra Mangra, who chairs an INGR working group on applications and services. “We want to look at [5G] from where we’re starting, all the way to 10 years in the future, but we’re very cognizant that it’s not only about networks,” he said: “We have to look outside to see how we impact other areas and how do other areas impact us.”

Looking at agriculture, requires taking into account rural development and climate change issues, Mangra said. “Rural development goes hand-in-hand with connectivity,” he said.

Wireless communications “is a basic requirement of life,” said David Witkowski, CEO of Oku Solutions and co-chair of the INGR deployment working group. Wireless is “no different than water, gas, sanitation,” he said. The current “boom” in the economy is “largely driven by mobile apps, mobile services, and that has been a trend that is not slowing down,” he said. But people use networks and usually take them for granted, he said.

Wireless is more important as people abandon wireline networks, Witkowski said. Now, 57 million children in the U.S. live in wireless-only households, as do 82% of renters and 85% of those under 34, he said. The challenge is building a network to deal with the scale. “4G is rather limited” though “it was a great tool for the time,” he said. 4G wasn’t built for the IoT or for wireless to be a substitute for cable or DSL, he said. 5G is unique as the first generation of wireless designed as an evolution rather than a complete change from the previous generation, and 6G is being designed to allow for similar evolution, he said.

Witkowski said his working group is asking broader questions. “What are the impacts on people from networks?” he asked: “How do people use them? What are the socio-economics of those networks and how does that play out in day-to-day life?”

The three main objectives of 5G -- high bandwidth, improved reliability and response time, and use by a large number of IoT devices -- have implications for energy use, said Francesco Carobolante, principal at IoTissimo, who's active in the energy efficiency working group. Engineering efforts needed to hit energy efficiency targets will take the rest of the decade to complete, he predicted. “Energy is the fundamental measure of cost-effectiveness and the viability of the infrastructure to support all the applications we expect,” he said.

Energy efficiency is more than a “nice to have” feature and “can be critical to enabling many applications,” Carobolante said. Energy efficiency “directly impacts” total costs and the ability to reach unserved populations, he said. “The success of 6G requires a system-level approach where you build the system from the ground up, with energy efficiency in mind,” he said.

Artificial intelligence is necessary to “help optimize everything, from base station operation to cell management,” Carobolante said. “We do need to do the hard work -- we cannot just stamp AI on top of the problem and think it gets resolved,” he said.

Witkowski said Wi-Fi can become an extension of cellular networks. “We’re starting to see movement in that direction,” he said. “There will be opportunities for the line between cellular and Wi-Fi to blur, and we will begin to see more offload,” he said.