5G & Beyond

Summary

“5G and beyond” refers to future generations of mobile wireless communication systems. The vision for these next-generation systems are to enable groundbreaking mobile applications requiring high-quality low-latency visual, tactile and audio telepresence, in addition to massive capacity (upwards of 1 000 times) and connectivity (billions of users and machines).

Next generation mobile communications have begun harnessing available frequencies at millimeter wavelength (30 – 300 GHz), where high propagation loss can be recovered by high-power transmitters with tens to hundreds of antennas, commonly referred to as Massive-MIMO antennas. The greater the number of antennas, the higher the transmit power that can be achieved by combining the individual power of each antenna, a technique otherwise known as beamforming. Industry is already exploring the use of massive-MIMO antenna arrays that allow increased simultaneous transmission capacity; millimeter-wave spectrum to alleviate the spectrum crunch in current frequency bands; and ultra-dense networks to allow short-range, high-speed data transfer.

An important part of CTL’s work in this area is sponsoring the NextG Channel Model Alliance, a nexus of efforts across the globe to develop future radio channels that will make up these massive capacity low latency 5G networks.