Accelerating connectivity through 5G: Deployment strategies, use cases, and future outlook

Modern civilization is characterized by increased use of mobile devices. This trend is only accelerating with the ever-increasing variety of devices, higher computational capacity, and capabilities of mobile devices that make them the popular choice of users. Like the devices, the service requests sent by these devices are increasing also in variety and complexity, including high-definition content streaming, online gaming, and support for autonomous vehicles, as well as the common use cases such as web surfing and online social networking. The requests are also more latency sensitive. At the same time, with the reduced size and power of each user device, the number of mobile users in a given area is ever increasing. This user-density growth, coupled with the explosive increase in traffic generated by mobile devices and IoT-enabled devices, is expected to challenge the performance of existing wireless access networks, causing degraded quality of service and limiting connectivity among users (Abbas et al., 2018; Nguyen et al., 2021; Spicher et al., 2021).

Smart devices and particularly mobile devices have become an integral part of daily life, impacting all aspects including work, communication, education, travel, smart city implementation, etc., and the ongoing pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation globally. The expectations on next-generation mobile systems are their ability to provide universal connectivity, support a humongous number of devices and connections, and deliver secure, high-speed, low-latency, seamless communications for all mobile and fixed applications. These demands require developing wireless systems capable of providing 10 to 100 times better performance than the current mobile systems, which is the key goal of 5G. The design and implementation of a network capable of supporting 5G demands is a major challenge and have been a hot research topic for several years, including topics such as 5G architecture, enabling technologies, air interface design, localization support, and security and privacy (Yang et al., 2019; Yao et al., 2018).