5G - A brief introduction

5G

Mobile and wireless networks have made tremendous growth in the last fifteen years. Nowadays many mobile phones have also a WLAN adapter. One may suppose that near soon many mobile phones will have WiMAX adapter too, besides their 3G, 2G, WLAN, Bluetooth etc. adapters. Today 3G mobile systems are on the ground providing IP connectivity for real-time and non-real-time services. On the other side, there are many wireless technologies that have proven to be important, with the most important ones being 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and 802.16 Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMAN), as well as ad-hoc Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) and wireless networks for digital TV and radio broadcast. Then, the concepts of 4G is already much discussed and it is almost certain that 4G will include several standards under a common umbrella, similarly to 3G, but with IEEE 802.xx wireless mobile networks included from the beginning. The 5G (Fifth Generation) mobile network concept, which is seen as user-centric concept instead of operator-centric as in 3G or service-centric concept as seen for 4G. In the 5G concept the mobile user is on the top of all. The 5G terminals will have software defined radios and modulation scheme as well as new error-control schemes can be downloaded from the Internet on the run. The development is seen towards the user terminals as a focus of the5G mobile networks. The terminals will have access to different wireless technologies at the same time and the terminal should be able to combine different flows from different technologies. Each network will be responsible for handling user-mobility, while the terminal will make the final choice among different wireless/mobile access network providers for a given service.