TOMORROW’S WIRELESS
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Lauren Davis
Every year, the National Instruments (NI) Technical Symposium offers an insight into the latest innovations in the areas of test, measurement and control.
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t the 2016 symposium, held in Sydney on 17 November, attendees were presented with an overview of how 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) are changing the future of wireless. Jeremy Taylor, area sales manager for NI, explained that standards bodies are currently putting together some of the standards that will form what everybody knows as 5G. These standards will differ across the three main use cases of 5G — that is, the three main ways in which it will be utilised: • Enhanced mobile broadband — requiring high data throughput, in the order of 10 Gbps or higher, to allow for fast video download and for virtual reality technologies. • Massive machine-type communication (mMTC) — requiring the ability to handle dense networks of devices, in order to increase the number of devices available to a network.
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• Ultrareliable machine-type communication (uMTC) — requiring low latency and high reliability, for applications where vehicles are talking to each other and to infrastructure. Different 5G applications will have different requirements, said Taylor, “whether you’re dealing with vehicles or transportation systems, in manufacturing, industrial automation, energy or health care”. 5G researchers therefore need to develop the right capabilities for each application, and the technologies to support these capabilities. But what exactly is 5G? Professor Jinhong Yuan, from UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, set out to explain the differences between 5G and 4G, noting that some people may think their 4G mobile phone has all the power they need. “People may say that 4G is faster than 3G, 3G is faster than 2G, so 5G will be better than 4G for sure,” said Professor Yuan.
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