We are living in an era of High Tech, where our day starts and ends with a smartphone in our hands. As of 2021, about 4.66 billion people around the world use the internet and this number keeps growing. Users and devices are consuming more and more data but confined within the same old bands of the radio frequency spectrum. What does that mean? Low bandwidth, more traffic, which obviously lead to slower services.
To get a better idea, consider the current spectrum as a crowded city. There is a fixed number of roads laid around but the number of vehicles is increasing day after day. Most of the land is already occupied, making it impossible to construct another road. Therefore all of the vehicles have no option but to use the existing roads, leading to heavy traffic.
Users demand faster data transmission and more reliable network services. This demand has laid the foundation of 5G, which came up with a solution for the above-mentioned problem. And that is to accommodate more vehicles above the current roads by constructing overpasses. 5G introduces a whole new spectrum of waves, the one that has never been used for mobile service before and is capable of building new pathways for connectivity- The Millimeter wave spectrum.
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) also known as Extremely High Frequency (EHF) is a band of frequencies between 30-300 GigaHertz. These frequencies used in 5G have a length varying from 1-10 mm, hence the name millimeter waves. Millimeter waves open up a new spectrum, thereby providing more room for the expansion of cellular services and reduce traffic in networks. The large bandwidth itself is the main attraction of mmWaves, allowing operators to meet the growing demand for high-speed data in scenarios where data congestion is a problem. They also provide high data rates of 10 Gigabits per second or even more. While ICs try to keep the circuitry small, usage of high frequency makes our antennas smaller, thus reducing the size of our devices.
Though Millimeter waves have a whole lot of advantages, they do have limitations. One of the key limitations is that they cannot penetrate through buildings and other obstacles. They are also prone to high atmospheric attenuation (absorbed by rain or leaves or even gases in the atmosphere) thereby limiting their range. Designers can overcome these losses with high-gain antennas and good receivers. Short-range is not essentially bad, as it reduces interference from unwanted radio frequencies and allows shorter frequency reuse.
Engineers have been trying their best to resolve the limitations of mmWaves by using an array of antennas for beamforming, which concentrates radio energy to extend the range. The efficiency of these antennas will depend on the signal coverage and many small cells will be required to supply adequate coverage in different environments. Thus 5G incorporates a set of brand new technologies working collectively, addressing each other’s limitations. As user expectations rise, 5G promises ultra-reliable low latency networks with unprecedented speeds and emerges as a generation of wireless networks that users can rely on every day.
Read PART 1 of the series: “EXPLORING 5G : PART 1- REFINING THE DIGITAL WORLD”
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