At the beginning of the twentieth century, mobile phones could only be used to make phone calls. Now we can receive emails and watch movies through mobile phones. Maybe soon, 5G mobile phones will come. Is 5G just an increase in traffic speed? I'm afraid there will be changes you can't imagine that will change our lives in an all-round way.
Development Trend of Mobile Phone
The first generation of mobile phones appeared in the 1980s, when mobile phones were huge and expensive. In the 1990s, when it came to the second generation, 2G, it became smaller, but it could only make phone calls and send newsletters. Since 2000, mobile phones have entered the era of 3G, and can start to use Internet application-related services, such as receiving email, browsing web pages and so on. Developed to 4G in 2010, the network bandwidth is bigger, can provide mobile streaming services, so that users can watch movies and listen to music smoothly.
What is the development trend of 5G?
Ai Jun, a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Information of Taiwan University, points out four trends. First, the applications of previous generations are mainly based on telephone. However, from the beginning of 4G, the traditional telephone service has been unable to meet our needs, so the telephone traffic will decline, while the data traffic will rise dramatically. Second, in the past, you just connected your mobile phone to the Internet. In the future, everything you see may be connected to the Internet, that is, the Internet of Things. Therefore, the number of devices connected to the Internet will be very large. Thirdly, the equipment of the Internet of Things is not only limited to mobile phones, but also household appliances, automotive devices and so on. The application services provided by the Internet of Things will be broader, broader and more diversified. Fourthly, manufacturers such as car dealers, industrial and commercial applications will want to join the mobile service market and share with telecom operators.
Therefore, there are three major requirements for 5G system: larger bandwidth, huge amount of equipment networking, and low latency. Aijun emphasized that "there was no such demand for delay in 4G before", but in the 5G era, sometimes application services can only tolerate delay of one millionth of a second, so it is very challenging for 5G system design.
Development Trend of Internet of Things
The most anticipated thing in 5G era is the Internet of Things, but if we only rely on the current cloud architecture, I am afraid we will face some problems. First, the network bandwidth is limited. There are a large number of devices connected to the Internet of Things. So even if the cloud and server can load, the bandwidth in the middle may be blocked by too much traffic. Of course, 5G bandwidth has increased a lot, but it certainly can't keep up with the increase of equipment. In addition, there is a certain transmission distance from the client to the cloud server, we request to the server, and then wait for the server to respond to us, it will need to wait for a period of time, in the Internet of Things, the delay will increase, so it will not be able to provide real-time services.
The solution is to turn the cloud into a fog, that is, to distribute the work previously concentrated on the cloud server to devices close to the client, a technology called fog computing. Aijun said, "Clouds are far away, fog is close around us." Another similar technology is edge computing, which pushes work from the center of the network to the edge or end of the network.
The development of fog computing is helpful to all manufacturers. For example, Telecom operators, although they have broadened their bandwidth, do not provide software application services, so they can not profit from it, which is equivalent to watching the money flow away in transmission, but it is the operators such as google, Amazon and so on that can make money. If fog-end technology is developed, base stations will have the opportunity to become servers, and telecom operators can also benefit from it. Even ordinary users can choose to provide fog computing services with their own devices to form a mode of shared economy.
