Visions of 5G Communications Jaydip Sen (# 197587) Innovation Lab, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Bengal Intelligent Park, Kolkata-700091 Email: Jaydip.Sen@tcs.com 1 Introduction Pushing the envelope well beyond the state-of-the-art in broadband wireless while building on the emerging generation of cognitive-radio and cooperative communication technologies, the 5 th Generation (5G) communication system will aim at designing and developing novel technologies, systems and networks that integrate into a flexible and dynamically-operating architecture. The architecture will possibly allow up to 1 Tbit/s (1 terabit per second = 10 12 bits/s) wireless link rate in burst-mode and at short distances or as system aggregated traffic and, a sustainable symmetric link rate of approximately 300 Mbps to mobile terminals at high speed. These demands are needed to meet the mega-communication demands of futuristic applications such as immersive and tele-presence applications thus enabling human-centric communications in 2020 and beyond. With coverage ranging from the very-short distance in the personal space at the home, the office or the car, to the mid-range in a metropolitan environment, the 5G system will hopefully materialize G. Marconi’s vision articulated more than eighty years ago by the phrase: “It is dangerous to put limits on wireless”. The realization of such a challenging goal calls for breakthroughs in a number of different areas but, more importantly, requires the re-consideration and reformulation of the fundamental networking design principles to take into account the dynamics of large interconnected systems. It will certainly take, to put it in the words of Marconi, multiple syntonies to achieve this task [1]. The challenging requirements of 5G can be attained designing new air interfaces and systems that achieve a 3 to 5 times improvement over current wireless communications in terms of channel efficiency; by using larger channel bandwidths in uncontested areas of the spectrum in higher frequency such as the EHF band and/or considering spectrum co-existence and sharing; employing smaller size cells with optimized dynamic spectrum management across different technologies; by developing novel cross-layer and cross-network optimization technologies based on the principles of power efficient cognitive and cooperative communications; by developing an end-to-end 5G system by jointly designing radio access systems and network protocols across a number of heterogeneous network architectures including ad-hoc, mesh and next-generation of cellular networks employing femto-cells and virtual-cells; and, by offering improved wireless-wireline interfaces with lower overheads to achieve the “aggregate bandwidth” that is needed to support the mega-communication demands of futuristic applications. In this concept paper, we discuss some motivational aspects in 5G communication research and discuss some specific challenges and techniques to overcome those challenges. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section2 presets the motivation for 5G communication research. Section 3 presents the concepts of 5G communication system. Section 4 depicts various scenarios in which 5G communication will be deployed and discusses some specific architectural issues of a 5G network. Section 5 presents a computational approach to illustrate how it is possible to achieve terabyte communication in 5G systems. Section 6 concludes the paper. 2 Motivation for 5G Communication In recent years we have witnessed an exponential increase in wireless access bandwidth that is commercially available to the end user. We envision that the need for high throughput will continue to increase in future wireless networks, fired by the rising needs of the mass market in the fields of bandwidth demanding applications such as entertainment, multimedia, intelligent transport systems (ITS), tele- medicine, emergency and safety/security applications. Futuristic applications such as: 3D Internet, virtual and augmented reality that combines data for all senses, audio, visual, haptic, digital scent, (e.g., tele-haptic applications, like planet or deep sea exploration), networked virtual reality (e.g., video streaming in social networks - users stream their own reality), and tele-presence (e.g., immersive environments with applications in both the commercial and military fields), can push the demand for real-time symmetric wireless connectivity to an individual with a data rate of 300 Mbps.