Move to 5G Has Public Safety Implications, Questions, IEEE Told

“First responders, and the emergency communications systems are one of our biggest customers and we absolutely are interested in building the right solutions as we move our network from 4G to adding all the capabilities of 5G,” Shamsunder said: Verizon will continue to improve 4G even as it builds out 5G, she said: “It is going to a fallback for the foreseeable future for a lot of operators. 4G is going nowhere, yet.”

The new generation of wireless' “capability for the systems to be able to address large amounts of data in near real time … is what will change the industry,” Shamsunder said. Everyone knows in general terms that high-band spectrum poses limitations, she said. “Learning [about] that was important, especially for our field teams,” she said. Verizon used low- and mid-band for years and its characteristics are well understood, she said.

Shamsunder said high-band spectrum is key to high throughput and data rates because mid-band spectrum is “relatively scarce” in the U.S. The industrial IoT will grow in importance, with many more cameras streaming video, but 4G networks weren't built “for that type of streaming or even limited streaming,” she said. With 5G, “you can deploy cheaper cameras that do not require additional processing, that are easier to maintain,” she said. Augmented and virtual reality are possible, but “limited, it is not at scale” with 4G and Wi-Fi networks, she said.

First responders face a problem with 5G, said Lin-Nan Lee, Hughes Network Systems vice president. 5G is “about millimeter-wave communications and as people working in millimeter-wave for a long time we know there’s a problem in terms of its range, particularly when it rains,” he said: “Attenuation is quite significant compared to a clear sky.” Economies of scale are a problem, he said. “We cannot deploy everywhere in a vast country like the United States and if you talk about Alaska and other places like that, it’s even worse.”

Even if a huge number of small cells are deployed, that will happen first in urban areas, then along highways but “never” in rural areas, Lee said. “It’s a huge communications problem … but it’s a work in progress in some sense” with first responders needing immediate information, and the requirement for interoperability among agencies responding to the same incident, Lee said. Satellite communications can help as a supplement to 5G, he said.

DOD

DOD is very focused on accelerating its adoption of 5G, which is about more than the network and “cellphones on steroids,” said Lisa Porter, deputy undersecretary-research and engineering. “This is really about pushing for ubiquitous connectivity," she said in a keynote. “We’re really moving from discrete to continuous communications, computation, data curation and management. We have to think about what that means, in terms of the opportunities, as well as, of course the vulnerabilities.”

No network will ever be completely secure, Porter said: “We really have to be thoughtful about the reality that there is no such thing as perfect security, so we go in with a zero-trust approach.” The Pentagon is focused on dynamic spectrum sharing and utilization, she said. “We need to understand how we can grab spectrum when we need it, where we need it, based on a combination of sensing, collaboration, as well as frequency-agile radios,” she said. “This is not a solved problem. We recognize that.”

DOD plans a series of testbeds with industry “to conduct collaborative experimentation at scale so that we can really explore dual-use cases” at U.S. bases, Porter said. That includes experiments in high-band and mid-band spectrum, she said. DOD put out a call for technical concepts and received more than 260 responses. DOD plans a “rolling” request for proposal starting in November, she said: “With something of this magnitude and this challenge we know we’re not going to get it all right the first time.”

The value of virtual and augmented reality are “pretty obvious” for the military, Porter said: “We would to be able to leverage those capabilities in training and rehearsals.” DOD is interested in “smart” bases and other installations, similar to smart cities or factories, she said. Smart technologies will help the military manage its assets and supply chain, she said. “The DOD has an obvious opportunity here to leverage where we see commercial going and say, ‘Let’s work with you and let’s do some experimentation at scale." There's “no finish line” when it comes to communications, she said: “We’re going to have to continue to invest in 6G, 7 and so forth.”

“We have a continual set of releases” from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, with release 16 in the works and due to premiere in the spring, said Edward Tiedemann, Qualcomm Technologies senior vice president-engineering. “We’re already in planning with release 17,” he said. People are talking about 6G, he said. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said: “It’s out there in about 10 years. It’s time for the research community to work on that and truly come up with the next generation of ideas that will take us beyond 5G.” Qualcomm continues to do research, and things that don’t fit with 5G have to wait for 6G, he said.

One key focus has to be making 5G work in unlicensed spectrum, Tiedemann said. The FCC is looking at 1.2 GHz of unlicensed spectrum in the 6 GHz band, he said. Part of release 16 will be new radio-unlicensed, or NR-U. It allows "some very wide bandwidth potential carriers” that public safety could use at an incident to get very high bandwidth communications, he said.

Mobile communications and machine learning are two of the fastest growing fields, and they're converging, said Vincent Poor, Princeton professor of electrical engineering. “We’ll see more and more in the coming years of the use of data-based design or data-based analysis of communications systems as we get into highly dense systems and systems with massive numbers of terminals.”