Why 5G Is Important

Today’s world will go to an immediate stand still if mobile computing, the Internet and the people’s use of smart devices are compromised. In today’s world, data is king and it is a vital resource in today’s society, like clean water and air. Its impact on man’s daily activities and lifestyle is so invaluable, there can possibly be no monetary remuneration to quantify their importance. The world will go on a complete breakdown if these systems of data flow is interrupted, subverted, or maliciously tampered with.  Nowadays, no physical boundaries exist that will stem the flow of data. Even though there are many advantages of free-flowing data between end users, businesses, and the government, stringent measures must be adopted to safeguard and protect these data (Sahin, et al., 2014).

The demand for data traffic is going to increase exponentially in the next few years makes it imperative to design a novel 5th Generation (5G) radio access technology (RAT) targeted at an upper data rate of 10 Gbps with sub-ms latency (Mogensen, et al., 2013). To cope with this high capacity demand, engineers foresee the solution through a massive deployment of small cells with limited coverage. Furthermore, 5G will utilize a bandwidth of at least 200 MHz and present the following advanced technology components - interference rejection combining (IRC) receivers, distributed link/rank coordination, inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques - to be able to deliver the agreed data rates in such a compact deployment.  Moreover, It was also concurred that the 5G RAT will be a scheduled system similar to the current Long Term Evolution – Advanced (LTE-A) radio standards and Long Term Evolution (LTE) (Holma & Toskala, 2009). Finally, 5G is also expected to support the newly discovered communication paradigms like the Machine Type of Communication (MTC) or the Device-to-Device (D2D) (Berardinelli, et al., 2014).

This is one of the most crucial challenges that fifth generation (5G) wireless broadband technology have to address as it synchronizes various online services, investigates mobility levels, an identifies different environment categories (Schaich, et al., 2015). The current applications of 5G include the Internet of Things, smart homes, and clean energy, and all these require sophisticated forms of 5G waveforms. That is why the demand for its applications are growing exponentially in virtually all fields of knowledge. One important area of research nowadays which developers would also like to get into is to find out the requirements of 5G networks to be able to get better waveform types, as this will lead to high spectrum efficiency and lower latency with less complexity in systems. 

I-2 Identifying the 5G Waveforms and Its Key Performance Indicators

One way to measure the different technical approaches for Air Interface Components for Mobile Broadband (MBB), Massive Machine Communications (MMC), Mission Critical Communications (MCC), Broadcast/Multicast Services (BMS) and Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications (V2X) as well as identify which are the most suitable waveforms used in 5G in covering all these applications is to use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The following are the 5G waveform candidates which include  filtered orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC), filter bank multicarrier (FBMC), and generalized frequency-division multiplexing] under the key performance indicators (KPIs) while the main KPI factors include the following - computational complexity, peak-to-average-power ratio, spectral efficiency, filter length, and latency. All these KPI factors in various 5G waveforms will all be collated and analyzed in this study.