5G for the Connected World

Preface

After the considerable success of LTE, why do we need a new system with a new radio and a new core? First, 5G will boost some of the LTE key performance indicators to a new horizon: capacity, latency, energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, and reliability. We will describe the relevant radio and core features to enable optimizations (5G to be 10, 100, or 1000 times better than LTE) in these areas in respective chapters of the book. But this is only half of the 5G story. With the service‐based architecture 5G Core supports natively a cloud‐based architecture, the higher layer split of the radio protocol as specified by 3GPP paves the path for a cloud‐based implementation of the radio network or parts of it and network slicing will open totally new revenue streams for operators by offering their network as a service to vertical industries. Slicing will enable operators implementing logical networks for diverse use cases (e.g. industrial applications) in an optimal way on their physical hardware. The 5G System also supports compute and storage separation natively, and introduces enablers to support the ability to perform dynamic run time load (re‐)balancing with no impact to user's services. In addition, open interfaces and the possibility to expose data from network functions to third parties via open APIs enables operators to monetize these contextual real‐time and non‐real‐time data or simply use the data to optimize network deployment and configuration. Operators can ...