Professor
Vodafone Chair
Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

 

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5G and its Impact on Electronics

With the introduction of the next cellular communications generation, a new frontier of technology for mankind is to be approaching. Up to now, we have used communications equipment to share and distribute content, examples being audio, voice, video, web data, and pictures. However, controlling real or virtual objects in real-time is not addressed yet. The key missing technical ingredient for this to happen is building communications systems with a guaranteed short latency to enable an end-to-end response time which is acceptable for a complete set of new applications, i.e. for the Tactile Internet to happen. Once the latency is achieved, humans as well as robots will be able to interact in real-time with virtual as well as real objects. That is the basis for a complete new set of applications, spanning the economies of health & care, manufacturing, mobility, edutainment, events, and energy. Each economy on its own is a market of similar value as cellular is today. The size of these new markets alone show what dramatic changes lay ahead, as well as how huge the opportunities are.

The human tactile-visual response time is in the range of 1-10ms, when moving real or virtual objects. If e.g. the display of virtual reality goggles reacts with a response time of 1ms, it can be guaranteed that humans do not get cyber-sick. Today’s communications systems as e.g. LTE (4G), however, deliver an end-to-end response time of 25ms in its best case. Hence, today’s technology does now allow for distributed real-time systems to be implemented at tactile reaction times. Hence, how can an architecture of a distributed electronic system as well as the next generation cellular standard (5G) be built to guarantee such a short end-to-end latency?

Also, many application scenarios for the Tactile Internet require that the system operates with a guaranteed uptime. The downtime is measured as outage. One challenge of design, therefore, is to deliver an end-to-end outage reaching a value as low as 10-8, e.g. to deliver an infrastructure to revolutionize manufacturing. Considering that well designed 4G networks deliver an outage of 3%, the gap shows the magnitude of the challenge of minimizing outage ahead.

Summarizing, new solutions must be found at almost every level of abstraction and for every component of electronic systems as well as embedded software systems of today. The chances and market opportunities ahead are too large not to address the challenges today. In particular, as it can be shown that no physical blocking point lies ahead.

About the speaker:

Gerhard Fettweis earned his Ph.D. degree from Aachen University of Technololgy (RWTH) in 1990. From 1990 to 1991, he was Visiting Scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, developing signal processing innovations for IBM’s disk drive products. From 1991 to 1994, he was a Scientist with TCSI Inc., Berkeley, CA, responsible for signal processor IC development projects for cellular phone chip-sets. Since 1994 he holds the Vodafone Chair at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. Gerhard Fettweis has (co-)authored 500 publications and more than 25 patent families. He is TPC Chair of IEEE ICC 2009 (Dresden), and has organized many other events. Among receiving other awards, as the Alcatel-Lucent Research Award, he is an IEEE Fellow. Next to producing scientific innovations, he has spun-out eight start-ups: Systemonic (now NXP and ST-NXP Wireless), Radioplan (Actix), Signalion, InCircuit, Dresden Silicon (Signalion), Freedelity, RadioOpt, and Blue Wonder Communications. At TU Dresden he setup a team of currently 20 companies sponsoring his research, coming from Asia, Europe, and the US. In addition, an equally large set of companies have funded his Ph.D. research projects so far. A prominent project example is the German EASY-C project, researching on LTE-Advanced technology, and setting up the largest cellular testbed in downtown Dresden. In his current capacity as the “Vodafone Academic Ambassador” he assists Vodafone in strategic guidance of international academic research collaborations.