Towards 5G

2 5G Requirements

Anass Benjebbour, Yoshihisa Kishiyama, and Takehiro Nakamura

NTT DoCoMo, Inc., Tokyo, Japan

2.1 Introduction

Over the last few decades, mobile communications have significantly contributed to the economic and social development of both developed and developing countries. Today, mobile communications form an indispensable part of the daily lives of billions of people in the world, a situation that is expected to continue and become even more widespread in the future. Currently, the 4G radio access system using Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is being deployed by many operators worldwide in order to offer faster access with lower latency and more efficiency than 3G/3.5G. In the future, however, it is foreseen that demand for higher volumes of traffic, many more connected devices with diverse service requirements, and better and uniform quality of user experience will bring a need for evolved systems with extended capabilities.

In order to meet these evolving needs for mobile communications, discussions on visions, requirements, and technologies for the 5G mobile communications system have been initiated by many organizations. 5G-related discussions are ongoing in the ITU-R Study Group 5 Working Party 5D (WP5D), which issued a new recommendation, “IMT Vision – Framework and overall objectives of the future development of IMT for 2020 and beyond”. Also, technical studies on 5G have gained attention worldwide as evidenced by the acceleration of efforts by governmental ...