5G Explained

Security and Deployment of Advanced Mobile Communications

Jyrki T. J. Penttinen

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119275732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mobile & Wireless Communications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Practical Guide Provides Students and Industry Professionals with Latest Information on 5G Mobile Networks

Continuing the tradition established in his previous publications, Jyrki Penttinen offers 5G Explained as a thorough yet concise introduction to recent advancements and growing trends in mobile telecommunications. In this case, Penttinen focuses on the development and employment of 5G mobile networks and, more specifically, the challenges inherent in adjusting to new global standardization requirements and in maintaining a high level of security even as mobile technology expands to new horizons. The text discusses, for example, the Internet of Things (IoT) and how to keep networks reliable and secure when they are constantly accessed by many different devices with varying levels of user involvement and competence.

5G Explained is primarily designed for specialists who need rapid acclimation to the possibilities and concerns presented by 5G adoption. Therefore, it assumes some prior knowledge of mobile communications. However, earlier chapters are structured so that even relative newcomers will gain useful information. Other notable features include:

• Three modules each consisting of three chapters: Introduction, Technical Network Description and Planning of Security and Deployment
• Comprehensive coverage of topics such as technical requirements for 5G, network architecture, radio and core networks and services/applications
• Discussion of specific security techniques in addition to common-sense guidelines for planning, deploying, managing and optimizing 5G networks

5G Explained offers crucial updates for anyone involved in designing, deploying or working with 5G networks. It should prove a valuable guide for operators, equipment manufacturers and other professionals in mobile equipment engineering and security, network planning and optimization, and mobile application development, or anyone looking to break into these fields.

1
Introduction

1.1 Overview

The 5G Explained presents key aspects of the next, evolved mobile communications system after the 4G era. This book concentrates on the deployment of 5G and discusses the security‐related aspects whilst concrete guidelines of both topics for the earlier generations can be found in the previously published books of the author in Refs. [1,2].

The fifth generation is a result of long development of mobile communications, the roots of its predecessors dating back to the 1980s when the first‐generation mobile communication networks started to convert into a reality [3]. Ever since, the new generations up to 4G have been based on the earlier experiences and learnings, giving the developers a base for designing enhanced security and technologies for the access, transport, signaling, and overall performance of the systems.

Regardless of the high performance of 4G systems, the telecom industry has identified a need for faster end‐user data rates due to constantly increasing performance requirements of the evolving multimedia. 5G systems have thus been designed to cope with these challenges by providing more capacity and enhanced user experiences that solve all the current needs even for the most advanced virtual reality applications. At the same time, the exponentially enhancing and growing number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices requires new security measures such as security breach monitoring, prevention mechanisms, and novelty manners to tackle the vast challenges the current and forthcoming IoT devices bring along.

The demand for 5G is reality based on the major operators' interest to proof the related concepts in global level. Nevertheless, the complete variant of 5G is still under development, with expected deployments complying with the full set of the strict performance requirements taking place as of 2020.

As there have been more concrete development and field testing activities by major operators, as well as agreements for the forthcoming 5G frequency allocation regulation by International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Radio Conference (WRC) 19, this book aims to summarize recent advances in the practical and standardization fields for detailing the technical functionality, including the less commonly discussed security‐breach prevention, network planning, optimization, and deployment aspects of 5G based on the available information during 2018 and basing on the first phase of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 15, which is the starting point for the gradual 5G deployment.

1.2 What Is 5G?

The term 5G refers to the fifth generation of mobile communication systems. They belong to the next major phase of mobile telecommunications standards beyond the current 4G networks that will comply with the forthcoming International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)‐2020 requirements of ITU‐R (radio section of the International Telecommunications Union). 5G provides much faster data rates with very low latency compared to the current systems up to 4G. It thus facilitates the adaptation of highly advanced services in wireless environment.

The industry seems to agree that 5G is, in fact, a combination of novel (yet to be developed and standardized) solutions and existing systems basing on 4G Long‐Term Evolution (LTE)‐Advanced, as well as non‐3GPP access technologies such as Wi‐Fi, which jointly contributes to optimizing the performance (providing at least 10 times higher data rate compared to current LTE‐Advanced networks), lower latency (including single‐digit range in terms of millisecond), and support of increased capacity demands for huge amounts of simultaneously connected consumer and machine‐to‐machine, or M2M, devices. Because of the key enablers of 5G, some of the expected highly enhanced use cases would include also the support of tactile Internet and augmented, virtual reality, which provide completely new, fluent, and highly attractive user experiences never seen before.

At present, there are many ideas about the more concrete form of 5G. Various mobile network operators (MNOs) and device manufacturers have been driving the technology via concrete demos and trials, which has been beneficial for the selection of optimal solutions in standardization. This, in turn, has expedited the system definition schedules. While these activities were beneficial for the overall development of 5G, they represented proprietary solutions until the international standardization has ensured the jointly agreed 5G definitions, which, in turn, has led into global 5G interoperability.

The mobile communication systems have converted our lives in such a dramatic way that it is hard to imagine communication in the 1980s, when facsimiles, letters, and plain old fixed‐line telephones were the means for exchanging messages. As soon as the first‐generation mobile networks took off and the second generation proved the benefits of data communications, there was no returning to those historical days. The multimedia‐capable third generation in the 2000s, and the current, highly advanced fourth generation offer us more fluent always‐on experiences, amazing data rates, and completely new and innovative mobile services. The pace has been breathtaking, yet we still are in rather basic phase compared to the advances we'll see during the next decade. We are in fact witnessing groundbreaking transition from the digital world toward truly connected society that will provide us with totally new ways to experience virtual reality and ambient intelligence of the autonomic IoT communications.

The ongoing work on the development of the next big step in the mobile communications, the fifth generation, includes the IoT as an integral part. Although one of the key goals of the 5G is to provide considerably higher data rates compared to the current 4G systems, with close to zero delays, at least an equally important aspect of the new system will be the ability to manage huge amount of simultaneously communicating IoT devices – perhaps thousands under a single radio cell.

1.3 Background

The term 5G is confusing. During 2016–2017, there were countless public announcements on the expected 5G network deployments while the 4G deployment was still in its most active deployment phase. Up to the third‐generation mobile communication networks, the terminology has been quite understandable, as 3G refers to a set of systems that comply with the IMT‐2000 (International Mobile Telecommunications for 3G) requirements designed by the ITU. Thus, the cdma2000, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS)/High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and their respective evolved systems belong to the third generation as the main representatives of this era.

The definition of the fourth generation is equally straightforward, based on the ITU's IMT‐Advanced requirements. While 3G had multiple representatives in practice, there are only two systems fulfilling the official, globally recognized 4G category as defined in IMT‐Advanced, and they are the 3GPP LTE‐Advanced as of Re...