EC 802(C) : 5G Technology

Overview of 5G Broadband Wireless

Communications

Ritu Gupta
Assistant Professor
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering
IGEC, Sagar
Evolution of Wireless Communications
 1G: Overview
• First generation wireless cellular technology (mobile telecommunications)
• Analog telecommunication standard introduced in 1980s and continued till
2G
• Primarily focused on transmitting voice signals
• Voice during a call is modulated to higher frequency typically 150 MHz
and up
• First commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone [NTT] in 1979 at Tokyo
• As of 2018, NMT Service in Russia remains the only 1G cellular network
still in operation (sparsely populated areas)
• Access technology: Frequency division multiple access (FDMA), where
spectrum is divided into frequencies and assigned to each users
 2G: Overview
• Initially proposed to support wireless voice communication facility
• First set of digital wireless communication devices compared to 1G systems
• Voice during a call is encoded to digital signals instead of modulation to higher frequencies

Family of 2G wireless cellular standards:

Generation Standard Data rate (approx.)
2G GSM 10 Kbps
2G IS-95 (CDMAone) 10 Kbps
2.5G GPRS 50 Kbps
2.5G EDGE 200 Kbps

GSM: Global System for Mobile communications, Interim Standard (IS) 95, GPRS: General Packet
Radio Service, EDGE: Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution

• GSM and IS-95 standards are mainly based on voice communication

• GPRS and EDGE: proposed with an idea of increasing the data rates over cellular networks to
provide low-speed data access such as internet, e-mail, etc.
• Frequency bands: 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 850 MHz.
• Access technology: Time division multiple access (TDMA), where each user access the entire radio
frequency for short period of time
• Spectral Bandwidth : 200 KHz
 3G: Overview
• Increasing demand for higher data rates over mobile devices led to the development of
3G cellular standards (around 2000)
• IMT – 2000 is a worldwide set of requirements issued by ITU for 3G and 3.5G mobile
communication
• 3GPP and 3GPP2 are standards organization which develop protocols for mobile
telephony
• Famous 3GPP works : GSM, UMTS, HSPA, LTE, LTE-A, 5G NR
• Access Technology: CDMA
– Encrypted transmission which were used for military communication.

Generation Standard Data rate (approx.)

3G WCDMA / UMTS 384 Kbps
3G CDMA 2000 384 Kbps
3.5G HSDPA / HSUPA 5 - 30 Mbps
3.5G 1x EVDO – Rev. A, B 5 - 30 Mbps

UMTS: Universal Mobile Telecommunication System, WCDMA: Wideband CDMA

HSDPA: High-speed downlink packet access, HSUPA: High-speed uplink packet access
EVDO: Evolution data optimized
 3G: Overview – Contd.

• 3G Standards are also termed as wideband wireless technologies as they employ spectrum
bandwidth generally in excess of 5 MHz
• UMTS : Third generation mobile cellular standard developed by 3rd generation partnership
project (3GPP) as a backward compatible to GSM
• HSPA (High Speed Packet Access): Amalgamation of two mobile protocols HSDPA and
HSUPA for improving the performance of existing 3G systems using WCDMA protocols
• CDMA 2000: Family of 3G standards developed by 3GPP2 as a backward compatible to 2G
IS-95
• CDMA 2000 was also expanded to include 1xEVDO standard and its subsequent revisions
were simply titled Rev. A and Rev. B to enhance the data rates
• 3G services supported transmission of multimedia and video content to mobile devices with
the enhancement of data rate above 10 Mbps
 4G – Overview
• IMT – A are the requirements issued by ITU for 4G and 4.5G mobile phone and internet
access
• Based on revolutionary new technology: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM) and the multiple access technique is called OFDMA
• Another breakthrough employed in 4G wireless systems is termed as multiple-input-multiple-
output (MIMO)
• These two techniques/technologies help 4G wireless systems to achieve data rates in excess of
500 Mbps
• Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE – A are standards developed by 3GPP
• Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) is under the purview of WiMAX
forum
• Spectral Bandwidth : 20 MHz

Generation Standard Data rate (approx.)

4G (3.9 G) LTE 100 - 200 Mbps
4G WiMAX 100 Mbps
4G LTE Advanced > 1 Gbps
 5G Overview
• 5G Wireless communication targets orders of magnitude increase in (i) wireless data rate (ii)
spectral bandwidths (iii) coverage area (iv) device connectivity
• Also, it aims massive reduction in (i) round trip delay (ii) energy consumption
Wireless data rates:
• Approximately 10 Gbps target data rates in cellular networks, which is 10 – 100 times
increase over LTE data rates
Device connectivity:
• To support dense connectivity for IoT applications (i.e. 1 M devices per square Km)
Coverage:
• Requires 99.999% availability with vanishingly small probability of outage
High Bandwidth:
• 10 times increase in bandwidth to support dense connectivity
Improved Battery Life:
• Reduction in power consumption & improvement in efficiency. Targets up to ten years battery
life for low power IoT devices compared to current battery life of a day or two
Round trip delay:
• Targets 1ms round trip latency. Approximately 10 – 20 times reduction in comparison to LTE
round trip delay of 20 ms.
 5G Overview – Contd.

IoT :
• Inter-connection of different objects such as electronic smart devices, vehicles, home
appliances, sensors, actuators, etc., to collect and exchange information.
• It has been forecasted that 50 billion physical objects and smart devices will be
connected in the IoT landscape.
• These objects can sense, communicate, and share information across network to provide
wealth of intelligence for better planning, management, and decision making.
• Examples: Taking the optimal route with lesser traffic that minimizes the travel time,
remote health monitoring for elderly patients, etc.

Reference: Internet resources

 5G Technical Requirements
• 5G must have the capability to support
diverse set of use cases
• Must provide QoS and QoE to manifold
applications and services and at the same
time must be reliable and secure
• ITU-R in its vision document IMT-2020
defines 5G communication capabilities
for its intended use cases in terms of
latency, mobility, peak data rate, spectrum
efficiency, and so on
• IMT-2020 use cases are given as follows:
– Enhanced mobile broadband
(eMBB) - Higher network capacity
and a higher peak data rate
– Ultra-reliable and low latency
communications (URLLC) - very
low latency and high reliability
– Massive machine type
communication (mMTC) demands
energy efficiency and connection
density.
 5G: Physical layer Techniques
(i) mm wave communication
(ii) Massive MIMO Massive Very high
(iii) Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) number of data rate
(iv) Full-duplex radio technology devices
Massive MIMO : Long
battery Very high
• Base station (BS) has substantially large life
number of antennas (approx. 100 - 200), capacity
which helps to improve connectivity and
supports multiple users simultaneously Reliability,
• Large number of antennas result in high Resilience
spatial multiplexing gains and the
capacity increases several folds
• The transmit power of each user can
decrease inversely proportional to the
number of antennas

Challenge: However, installing so many antennas also cause more interferences.

Solution: Beamforming - To achieve high signal power at intended receiver, beamforming is applied at the
transmitter by transmitting the same signal with different amplitude and phase such that the signal components
add coherently at the receiver
5G: Physical layer Techniques – Contd.
mm-wave communication:
• Available bandwidth plays a key role in determining the data rate. Lower carrier frequency (<
6 GHz) enable reliable signal propagation. But only limited spectral bandwidths are available
in sub-6 GHz spectrum. One possible solution is to expose un-used high frequency mm-wave
band ranging from 6 to 300 GHz
• Availability of 54+99+99 = 252 GHz of potential bandwidths in mm wave band. However,
challenges are higher propagation loss, scattering & reduction in distance, which requires
intelligent signal processing methods
 5G: Physical layer Techniques – Contd.
• NOMA: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access scheme proposed by NTT DoCoMo for next
generation mobile network
• NOMA: Non-orthogonal multiplexing, where users are multiplexed in power domain
• Signals from different users are superimposed at transmitter side and separated at receiver
using successive interference cancellation (SIC)

Broadcast nature of wireless channels is utilized

to allow multiple users to share same time and FDMA – 1G
frequency resources while maintaining TDMA – 2G
controlled level of interference. Drawback: CDMA – 3G
Receiver Complexity OFDMA – 4G
NOMA – 5G
Main Advantages:
1. Improved spectral efficiency for UEs
compared to OMA schemes
2. Massive Connectivity: The number of users
connected is not strictly limited by the
available resources such as frequency, time,
etc.
5G: Physical layer Techniques – Contd.

Full Duplex Radio Technology:

Conventional communications (LTE or 4G) employs two modes:
Frequency division duplexing and time division duplexing
FDD: Uplink and Downlink signals are separated by orthogonal
frequency bands
TDD: Uplink and Downlink signals are separated by orthogonal time
slots

Full Duplex: Simultaneous transmission and reception using same

frequency band at the same time, which increases spectral efficiency
Challenge: Self-Interference, which needs to be suppressed
5G: Physical layer Techniques – Contd.
COOPERATIVE SWIPT NOMA
 RF ENERGY HARAVESTING
 RF energy harvesting is energy conversion technique employed for converting energy
from the electromagnetic (EM) field into the electrical domain (i.e., into voltage and
currents)

 NOMA requires SIC ,which is a computationally intensive task., due to which there is a
burden on the battery life

 In cooperative communication, where the near user acts as a relay to the far user due to
which battery of relay drains fast

 In general, RF energy harvesting is employed to improve battery life

 There are two main techniques used for RF energy harvesting, they are wireless power
transfer (WPT) and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)

 SWIPT: Nodes harvest energy from incoming RF signal using time or power splitting
techniques and transmit information using harvested energy
 Programmable Wireless Environment
• Conventional Communication: Wireless channels are regarded as a destructive
entity yielding distorted received signals
• Most destructive wireless channels : Double selective channel (i.e. time and
frequency selective) widely appears in vehicular communication
• Wireless communication may also experience significant shadowing due to high-
rise buildings as well as major vegetation in rural environments
• Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) has attracted increasing attention aiming
to create a smart environment
• IRS: Programmable surfaces comprising a vast amount of tiny and passive
antenna elements with reconfigurable processing networks

Image Source: Ertugrul Basar et al. “Wireless Communications Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces”. In: IEEE Access 7
(2019), pp. 116753–116773
 Programmable Wireless Environment
• IRSs can control the phase, amplitude, etc. of incident wireless
signals which help in overcoming the negative effects of wireless
propagation
• IRSs allow the environment itself to be considered as an element
of communication system to enable enlarged coverage
• Sufficiently large IRSs can outperform traditional relay-aided
allowing nearly-passive implementation with reduced complexity
• 6G can take advantage of IRSs in coverage limited scenarios
such as V2X communication operating at mmWave and THz
bands
• IRSs can enhance the vehicular channel conditions by
introducing enhanced multipath propagation resulting in large
transmission coverage
Programmable Wireless Environment
• An out-of-coverage traffic
intersection is an ideal use case
scenario for using IRS
• Strength of the received signal
power reduces due to blockages
• Nodes located on perpendicular
street: Result in performance
degradation
• IRS may be installed on the
surfaces of buildings around the
intersection
• The communicating coverage
can be enhanced by IRS
Image Source: 6G for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications: Enabling Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities,
Proceedings of IEEE, June 2022
 Why Regulations are required?
• Radio Spectrum is a Limited Natural Resource
– Radio spectrum is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and only a limited
frequency range is suitable for wireless communication.
– Unlike infrastructure, spectrum cannot be manufactured or expanded.
– 5G requires large bandwidths, especially in mid-band and mmWave frequencies.
– Regulations ensure:
• Optimal usage of available frequencies
• Prevention of spectrum hoarding by operators
• Prevents Interference Between Services
– Multiple services operate simultaneously like Mobile networks,
– Satellite systems
– Broadcasting
– Defense and emergency services

• Without regulation:
– Overlapping frequencies cause co-channel and
adjacent channel interference
Thanks