Europe commits EUR5 Billion for 5G including Software-Defined Power

On the 1st of July this year the first phase projects of the European 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) were started with a joint meeting in Paris. This is a major milestone in a joint initiative between the European Commission and the European ICT industry to get research investment focused in a very coherent way on the challenges associated with having a communications infrastructure capable of coping with all future demands by 2020. A major goal of this effort is to achieve a saving up to 90% of energy per service provided. The main focus will be in mobile communication networks where the dominating energy consumption comes from the radio access network. A final standard is expected sometime in 2018. Field trails are expected to start in 2016. And the 2018 Olympics in Korea is expected to be the first wide-scale public demonstration of 5G.

“One of the most urgent and critical challenges in the design of 5G wireless communication systems is that of mitigating their energy consumption in light of a greatly increased data rate. Indeed while it has now been some years that the topic of energy-efficient design of communication networks has gained a prominent role, due to both economic reasons and environmental concerns on sustainable growth, it is expected that in the 5G era, with millions more base stations and billions of connected devices, this topic will be even more compelling. Given the required 1000x increase in offered data rates and throughput with respect to current state-of-the art technology, the network energy efficiency must be improved by at least the same factor, in order to keep the energy consumption at today’s level,” commented Dr. Alessio Zappone with TU Dresden.

"While software is playing an increasingly prominent role in networking at a system architecture level, it also has growing importance for the delivery of power in the future. The use of power-optimization software algorithms and the concept of the Software Defined Power Architecture (SDPA) are all being seen as part of a brave new future for advanced board-power management. Energy management at the board level has evolved over the past few years, starting from virtually nowhere a decade ago to the latest advanced power systems that make use of digital monitoring and control software to improve conversion efficiency - SDPA is a natural evolution of digital power" commented Patrick Le Fèvre, Marketing & Communication Director, Ericsson - Power Modules.

"Although there are many challenges to make the SDPA a reality, it is an important concept with board power management being increasingly software managed and controlled. In the future it may be possible that the SPDA will evolve to help at both the board and system level and handle the energy delivered to many different functions in more efficient ways," Le Fèvre predicted. Software Defined Power will be one of several areas of focus at the up-coming Darnell Energy Summit.

The motivation for the 5G PPP is to secure Europe’s leadership in the particular areas where Europe is strong or where there is potential for creating new markets such as smart cities, e-health, intelligent transport, education or entertainment and media. The 5G PPP initiative will reinforce the European industry to successfully compete on global markets and open new innovation opportunities. It will “open a platform that helps us reach our common goal to maintain and strengthen the global technological lead”.

The goals for the 5G Infrastructure PPP are: Saving up to 90% of energy per service provided. The main focus will be in mobile communication networks where the dominating energy consumption comes from the radio access network; Providing 1000 times higher wireless area capacity and more varied service capabilities compared to 2010; Reducing the average service creation time cycle from 90 hours to 90 minutes; Creating a secure, reliable and dependable Internet with a “zero perceived” downtime for services provision; Facilitating very dense deployments of wireless communication links to connect over 7 trillion wireless devices serving over 7 billion people; and Ensuring for everyone and everywhere the access to a wider panel of services and applications at lower cost.

The 5G Infrastructure Association, as the Private side of this public-private partnership, has already started working groups, in collaboration with the Networld2020 ETP community, on Key items such as pre-standards, spectrum requirements, and maintaining a 5G Vision to guide the work.

The first call for projects held at the end of 2014 has resulted in 19 projects being selected addressing a rich cross section of the research challenges leading to a 5G infrastructure by 2020. Predictably, the majority of the projects are focusing on radio and wireless technologies as the shared belief is that the vast majority of future communications will use wireless access technologies. This puts tremendous requirements on the projects to find ways to maximize the efficiency of the wireless interfaces, optimize the use of scarce resources – such as spectrum and energy – and dramatically increase the throughput capability of the infrastructure.

The 5G infrastructure will have to cope with everything from billions of small devices in the Internet of Things domain to billions of heavy data consumers enhancing their lives and activities with real-time multimedia content. The new approach must be fully convergent as well as there will be no arbitrary distinction between fixed and mobile – there will be simply a seamless infrastructure satisfying everyone’s communications needs in and invisible, but totally dependable, way.

The 19 projects selected are:

These projects represent the first phase on investment in the 5G-PPP challenges and they will be followed by a second set, building on the work from the first phase, which is due to be called for in 2016 and launched in 2017.