The evolution of network technologies over the years has resulted in users getting higher bandwidth, faster big data analytics and service offerings.
However, with the next logical step in the internet evolution with 5G – the next generation of mobile data connectivity is going to be enormous across industries in the form of increased deployment of the machine to machine (M2M) communications and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
The growth of 5G enabled services for industries across sectors requires the service providers to look into their network architecture to meet 5G demands to enable them to capture new business opportunities.
By using the Network Functions Visualizations (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) so as to implement control and user plane separation will result in enabling scalability and flexibility of network configurations for 5G requirements.
Using both NFV and SDN would provide ease of operation for future services through network automation.
The Categorization Of 5G Services
The 5G services can be aptly categorized under three services each having their own unique perquisites for their applications.
The three service categories are
- Enhanced mobile broadband (EMBB)
- Ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC)
- Massive machine type communication (MMTC)
In case of EMBB, it requires high bandwidth and relaxed latency, whereas MMTC requires low bandwidth and massive connection scale and URLLC requires high bandwidth, ultra reliability, and ultra low latency.
Governments across the globe are investing in smart cities development with 5G URLLC and MMTC playing a crucial role in homes, smart transportation and autonomous vehicles connecting billions of IP-based devices.
5G’s URLLC and EMBB are expected to play a key role towards sophisticated health care services such as remote surgery.
The impact of 5G is expected to felt on transportation sector especially in the case of manufacturing hyper-connected intelligent cars also known as autonomous cars.
The Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) architecture and an end to end networking including tactile internet platform is the backbone of these vehicles.
The quality of healthcare gets improved with the 5G paving way for a new generation of robots. These robots can be controlled in real time and connected to people and machines globally handling the massive amount of data.
For instance, humans and robots can be connected by 5G in operating rooms with a team of physicians or surgeons present in other parts of the planet or in more than one location to provide surgery.
With the emergence of the tactile internet, surgeons would be able to get real-time “tactile-feel” through the robots performing the actual surgery. 5G’s extensive bandwidth would help in transmitting higher resolution images and videos to the surgeons.
The number of uses of 5G is going to increase over the coming decades with comprehensive offerings ready for every sector or industry such as in the case of Services in the form of new 5-G enabled services, Infrastructure standing up for mapping the right 5G infrastructure needs and through Automation that would help in creating mass network scaling for 5G simpler to manage and operate.
The number of internet connected devices is expected to connect approximately 27.1 billion people globally on service provider networks by the end of 2021 enabling 5G to play a prominent role in providing new value-added and revenue generating services for customers.
