After the 5G commercial license was officially issued to four operators, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom all publicly stated that it will take the SA architecture as its ultimate goal and announce several application scenarios. What does these mean for developers? Will it change the development model and tool chain? What new application scenarios will it bring? This article focuses on the current development status and future trends of 5G, and will talk about what factors developers need to pay attention to in this.
has gone from 3G to 4G to lead by 5G. China's development pace in the 5G era has entered the first echelon of the world. In the first half of 2019, 11 5G mobile phones have been launched worldwide, with an entry-level price of about US$600; it is expected that by the Q4 quarter of 2019, the second brand of mainstream manufacturers will gradually use 5G mobile phones, and the entry-level price of 5G mobile phones is expected to drop to around US$300, and the industrial chain will move closer to US$300 to US$400.
With the formal determination of 5G spectrum division and commercial licenses, China's current work at the standard setting level is ready, and the next two years will usher in the concentrated implementation of 5G commercial scenarios, and technical strength will play a crucial role in this stage. For developers, 5G will also bring many changes to development scenarios and development models. In this regard, InfoQ interviewed Nie Song, the head of Huawei Cloud 5G+Cloud+X, to understand what impact 5G and cloud computing will have on developers.
Application Scenario Changes
At the recently held 2019 World Mobile Conference (MWC), China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom all announced that the 5G network will adopt independent networking as the target architecture. In the two architectures of 5G network independent networking (Standalone, referred to as SA) and non-Standalone (Non-Standalone, referred to as NSA), the 5G carrier of the NSA architecture only carries user data, and its control signaling is still transmitted through the 4G network. Its deployment can be regarded as adding new carriers to the existing 4G network for capacity expansion. The SA architecture adopts an architecture with a new design idea. While introducing new network elements and interfaces, it adopts new technologies such as network virtualization and software-defined networks on a large scale. Combined with the new 5G NR air interface technology, the technical challenges faced by its protocol development, network planning and deployment, and interoperability will exceed 3G and 4G systems. The statements of the three major operators mean that the transition from 4G to 5G is gradually entering the final stage, and 5G will enter a new stage of development.
standard formulation and equipment production are mainly the tasks of operators and equipment suppliers, but the new application scenarios brought by 5G may bring more new opportunities to developers. In December 2018, South Korea announced the start of 5G commercial use. In March 2019, it will be targeted at end users. According to the packages provided by the three major Korean operators, the big difference in the 5G era is that it is the form of traffic plus content. As shown in the figure below:
This situation may also occur in China. China Mobile has currently incubated dozens of application scenarios, especially heavy 5G scenarios. The so-called heavy 5G scenarios can be understood as scenarios that require high demands on low latency and high reliability, and only breakthroughs can be achieved under 5G technical indicators. More representative ones are VR/AR, cloud gaming, high-definition video, video EI, drones, etc. These scenarios have not been friendly in the 4G era. For example, although some VR devices (such as Samsung Gear VR) are currently completely wireless, most of them need to connect the helmet to the computer with wires to transmit data and electricity. If you are sitting and using a helmet and a gamepad, there is no problem, but when you are walking indoors, the wires may be in the way, and wearing VR devices for a long time can easily make people feel dizzy. With the help of 5G and cloud computing, VR devices can be connected to computers without wires, and computing power can be directly transmitted to cloud computing. Application scenarios like this will give developers more choices.
Nie Song said that from the definition of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the basic technical indicators to achieve by 5G include: a peak capacity of 20Gbps, a user experience rate of 100Mbps, a 1 millisecond air interface delay, a network energy consumption efficiency improvement of up to 100 times, and a number of 1 million connections per square kilometer, etc. Some indicators are more than ten times higher than 4G. The three major 5G scenarios defined by ITU include eMBB (enhanced mobile broadband ), mMTC (massive machine communication) and uRLLC (ultra-reliable and low latency).
Specifically, eMBB refers to scenes such as 3D video, UHD screen, cloud-based office, etc.; mMTC mainly refers to scenes such as smart cities and smart homes; uRLLC mainly refers to scenes such as industrial automation, Mission Critical applications and autonomous driving. Among them, the relevant standards of eMBB have been formulated, which means that 5G can achieve the goal of low latency and high reliability. Therefore, developers can focus on the application of this scenario at this stage.
In addition, some developers believe that in the 4G era, many applications do not feel that the speed is limited or the experience is poor. In this context, is 5G necessary? In this regard, Nie Song believes that the impact of 5G on all scenarios is not consistent. The severe 5G scenario mentioned above may benefit the most from it, while mild and moderate 5G scenarios, such as e-commerce, social networking, traditional games; cloud computers, cloud mobile phones and mobile videos, will also change to varying degrees, such as faster speeds, significantly reduced traffic costs, APP streaming (cloudization), and end-side computing power cloud, but the impact is not as large as the severe 5G scenarios.
In summary, from the perspective of functions, 4G mainly provides mobile broadband experience to individual consumers. In addition to providing enhanced personal mobile broadband experience, 5G will also drive the combination of mobile communications with various industries, which may bring many new opportunities to developers.
development model changes
application scenario changes will naturally bring about changes in development model. Looking back at the development history of China's Internet in the past few years, traffic entrances have gradually transitioned from PC to mobile phones. Now, Nie Song said that in the 5G era, the cloud is likely to become a new traffic entrance. When the transmission speed is improved, a large number of computing will be easily transferred to the cloud, and the development model will also evolve towards the direction of "All in Cloud". The requirements for mobile phone terminals may not be very high. The function of mobile phones is more about screen display. All storage computing is running in the cloud. Many mobile phones cannot support tasks that cannot be quickly uploaded to the cloud in the 4G era, such as large-scale image rendering, can be solved through cloud platforms.
Take the cloud gaming scenario as an example. Nie Song said that at present, large mobile games require users to download APPs to use, and updates must be manually downloaded and installed through the application store. Cloud games do not require users to download applications. All renderings and calculations are completed in the cloud. Users only need to use URLs to enter the game interface. This idea is similar to current mini programs, but mini programs still have many restrictions. They also rely on a specific APP and are more suitable for lightweight applications. In this context, developers do not need to deploy logic separately on the server side while developing multi-terminal versions. The cloud platform can undertake a lot of work, including distribution. The developer's development model will be affected. The development language may not change much, but the workload should be reduced, because the cloud platform can provide many general components and does not need to worry about terminal adaptation. New tools and frameworks may appear, but the development logic is the same, so there is no need to worry too much about this.
However, although the emergence of 5G has solved the problem of high bandwidth and low latency between mobile phones and base stations and , the delay problem on the backbone network has not been directly solved. Nie Song said that cloud manufacturers have taken great responsibility in this. If they cannot provide cloud platforms with higher cost-effectiveness and intelligence and lower latency, they may become a bottleneck in the 5G era. Taking edge computing as an example, when demand arises, the optimal solution is definitely to be used to calculate the nearest node. The computing cost through the BGP network and the single-line network may be ten times different. Therefore, although many cloud manufacturers currently provide edge computing solutions, the problems to be solved behind this are still very complex.
Technical Solution
Specifically for the technical solution level, many cloud manufacturers have launched corresponding solutions in the past two years, especially cloud gaming and edge computing. Taking edge computing as an example, the business challenges it faces mainly include the huge amount of video and timing data, poor network, and difficult to return data; the development of existing solutions is difficult to carry out real-time and intelligent processing; there are many scenario-based heterogeneous interfaces and protocols, which are difficult to collect and process; data involves the safety of enterprise production and business activities, and high security requirements.The technical requirements for edge computing are based on edge flow computing/ML prediction, which performs real-time processing and decision-making at the edge; based on edge container and function capabilities, reduces the difficulty of edge application development; based on protocol parsing framework, the access and backhaul of heterogeneous information is realized; edge computing capabilities can be deployed independently, and can be safely and controllable and coordinated with the cloud. In summary, in 5G scenarios, it is also necessary to significantly reduce the cost and latency of the center bandwidth, and support lightweight deployment and multiple computing models.
In addition to the release of Tiangang chips and Balong 5000 modem in Huawei , Huawei Cloud has also built solutions for many application scenarios. Nie Song said that at the edge computing level, Huawei Cloud provides full-stack capabilities from hardware to OS to IEF, achieving faster, smarter, heterogeneous support for ML scheduling and prediction; at the VR level, Huawei Cloud develops Cloud VR technology architecture, consisting of content, platform, network and terminals. The platform mainly provides cloud rendering, streaming, transcoding, storage, encoding and other functions for CloudVR video and CloudVR strong interactive services. Industry developers can rent multiple Huawei cloud hosts based on the Cloud VR connection service provided by Huawei X Labs, build their own business platform (management node + resource pool), and carry out Cloud VR services for multiple people/multi-regional areas; at the network level, Huawei Cloud's Link Turbo technology can greatly improve the weak network experience, realize the terminal's "full connection" vision through the MP-UDP/TCP protocol, and the entire link switching process has no perception to users; Huawei EI cloud service builds a full-life-cycle full-stack service around the data development process.
Huawei EI cloud service architecture
5G hot topic
5G and Wi-Fi The high bandwidth provided by
5G makes users worry about the future survival status of Wi-Fi, because in many scenarios, users tend to use 4G networks, such as hotels and other public places where network speed has been criticized. Even things like sending and receiving emails can be done long ago through the mobile terminal. During the interview, Nie Song said that the emergence of 5G will indeed gradually replace some functions, such as Wi-Fi, but it will still be in a state of coexistence for a long time. Huawei is also providing Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 6 actually matches 5G capabilities, providing stronger bandwidth, lower latency and more stable signals, and gradually moving forward to facilitate the formation of end-to-end scenarios. After
5G arrives, will the number of base stations be greater?
The relevant person in charge of Huawei 5G product line recently answered the question in an interview with "Shenwang". He said that it is a misunderstanding that the number of base stations will increase when 5G arrives. With the development of mobile communication technology, it will be a trend for base stations to integrate multi-band and multi-standards. Huawei has developed 5G minimalist products and solutions that can support multi-band and multi-systems and highly integrated into a base station product. Therefore, operators only need to upgrade the original base station. Not only can they provide super large capacity and the same coverage as 4G base stations, but they can also be compatible with multiple 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G standards and multiple frequency bands at the same time, without adding new sites and base stations.
Conclusion
Communication has developed rapidly over the past 20 years, but it has also taken many detours. Until the 4G era, there are still three standards, which have increased the cost of operators and increased consumer spending. Therefore, the world pursues unified standards to reduce costs, increase speed, and provide better services to consumers. Obviously, 5G has now formed a unified standard, which was formed by hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers around the world through more than ten years of hard work.
Huawei has been investing in 5G for nearly ten years and has been unswervingly maintaining the unified 5G standards. It is committed to helping operators deploy 5G networks with low-cost and high-efficiency solutions. It has submitted a total of 18,000 proposals to 3GPP. In terms of 5G basic patents, Huawei owns a total of 2,570 5G basic patents, accounting for more than 20%. At the end of the interview, Nie Song said that Huawei Cloud has long been fully prepared for the arrival of 5G and is expected to be the first to launch a number of innovative solutions. (Article source: InfoQ)
Source: China Net Science
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