At present, the whole communication technology field has encountered a big problem: the exponential growth of communication technology indicators for decades has not been supported, and new theoretical innovations are urgently needed, which has brought about major breakthroughs in the network. For example, fiber-optic communication began to develop in 1966, and its output value will double every 9-12 months, but in recent years it has not moved. Moore’s Law has also encountered this problem; the code of large-system software has broken through several times.  The unit bit energy consumption of big data is not sustainable. What can support exponential growth in the future?

Yu Shaohua, member of China Engineering Academy

To sum up the iconic applications and devices of previous generations of mobile communications, each generation’s success has inherent logic: 1G is the era of cellular phone; 2G has voice services and text messages, the rise of Nokia phones; when 3G comes, main smart phones, ring tones, MMS,  Videophones and narrow-band data services, smartphones appear; 4G began to appear WeChat, Alipay, and positioning services, etc., widescreen high-capacity smartphones.

Now, everyone (especially the operator) is concerned that the 5G investment is much larger than 4G. What is the 5G’s iconic new application and new equipment? 5G will have a huge difference compared with 4G, the number of connections will increase by 10-100 times, the peak rate will reach 10 G, and the connection density of delay less than 1 millisecond will increase by 10-100 times, so 5G will be in various scenarios. Form a rich range of iconic applications and equipment.

In the future, the network will be interconnected from the human-to-human to the human-object interconnection, to the object-object interconnection, and comprehensively extended to the direction of the sky-air-ground. In terms of human-to-human interconnection, 8K ultra-high-definition video is an example. Ultra-high definition video terminals and cameras are new carriers, which will gradually develop towards AI video surveillance; autonomous vehicles are the iconic application of human-object interconnection; The Internet of Things has a digital smart factory based on the Industrial Internet, industrial automation equipment, robots and remote breeding grazing supported by various types of biosensors.

In the late 5G era, there may be an immersive experience, and then there will be some new applications, such as mature AI services, AI perception, and communication devices that integrate land, sea, and air.

In short, the future network performance will tend to “TRUST” – T is Tb / s broadband; R is ultra high reliability; U is the overload connection; S is the sub-millisecond delay; T is the large Hertz spectrum. In the future, “There is nothing not connected.”