Wu Hequan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: 5G new infrastructure faces five major challenges

At the "5G and Network Development Strategy Seminar" hosted by the FuTURE Forum recently, Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, stated that 5G is regarded as the first choice for new infrastructure and is entrusted with the important task of responding to the economic downward pressure brought about by the epidemic and providing a new engine for high-quality and sustainable economic development.

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"The new infrastructure is not just a construction project for China's 5G, but also a continuation of technological innovation and a real test for China's 5G leadership." Wu Hequan pointed out that the new 5G infrastructure will bring five major challenges in terms of technology, operation and maintenance, products, market and security maturity.

The first challenge is technology maturity.

It has been less than half a year since my country's 5G was officially put into commercial use, but its main highlight is still broadband mobile access, and it has not yet been fully tested with large traffic, large connections, high reliability and low latency.

This year, China is the first country in the world to carry out large-scale construction of independent networking (SA), and will launch new functions such as SBA (service-based network system), virtualization, and network slicing, laying the foundation for applications for industrial Internet and Internet of Vehicles. However, large-scale networking technologies such as SDN, NFV, SRv6, network slicing, and SD-WAN have not yet been verified, and we face the risk of exploring SA.

In terms of core network routing protocols, there is no breakthrough in the current 5G standards. The IETF is now focusing on developing application standards for IPv6 in routing protocols. The ITU has proposed New IP, flexible and variable-length IP packets, diversified addressing, and super TCP, which also need to be considered when building a large-scale 5G core network.

Millimeter wave technology needs to be used in areas with dense business flows, and my country's technological accumulation in this frequency band is a shortcoming.

The second challenge is the maturity of operations and maintenance.

Under the SA network system, there is a lack of application experience in SDN with complex routing across the entire network and VPN with multiple types of ultra-massive connections. There is also a problem with how network slicing can be compatible with existing networks. It is necessary to study the mechanism for avoiding conflicts among the combinations of SBA business units.

Although there have been examples of two operators jointly building networks abroad, the depth and scale of sharing cannot be compared with the joint construction of 5G networks by China Telecom and China Unicom. China Telecom, China Unicom and China Broadcasting Corporation jointly use the 3300-3400MHz frequency band for 5G indoor coverage across the country, provided that interface and network management standards are met.

Centralizing one OSS for the entire network is conducive to the statistical and intelligent analysis of business and network resource big data, and automatically generating a global optimization and orchestration plan for communication equipment and services, but the processing capacity and processing latency are difficult to meet the requirements. If OSS is set up by region, each OSS needs to communicate with the central OSS, which will introduce latency.

Reasonable MEC granularity is an issue that needs to be explored in practice. Applications such as mobile terminals, robots, and connected cars need to switch between MECs, which involves issues such as coordination between MECs and reasonable allocation of functions between MECs and the central cloud while ensuring latency. In addition, how to open up MEC capabilities to vertical industries is also an issue that needs to be studied.

The third aspect is product maturity.

"Low-power, low-cost 5G terminals are the bottleneck for large-scale commercial use. The industry is pinning its hopes on the large-scale mass production of domestic multi-mode, multi-screen chips that support SA." Wu Hequan pointed out that the 5G baseband chips on the market are mainly based on 7-nanometer technology, while the next generation of chips with higher process levels have begun to be released abroad. The supply chain of my country's self-developed new generation of 5G terminal chips is at risk of being controlled by others, and the pressure for continuous chip innovation is great.

At the same time, Wu Hequan said that after more than half a year of efforts, the power consumption of 5G base stations has been reduced by nearly half, but the current power consumption of 5G base stations is still three times that of 4G, and it is quite difficult to reduce it further. Regarding the weak links of 5G terminal test instruments and network optimization instruments.

In addition, the maturity, reliability and compatibility of the new generation of operating systems and operating platforms for domestic mobile phones remain to be tested.

The fourth challenge is market maturity.

Currently, the public's perception of 5G is that it has wider bandwidth and faster speed, which is not enough to quickly expand the user base. Users need a higher value experience.

Industry applications are highly personalized and are related to the coordinated opening of upstream and downstream industrial chains, as well as industry management and access. Currently, the rigid demand, cross-border cooperation and business model of the industry are still unclear, and the enthusiasm of industry leaders has yet to be exerted.

Wu Hequan specifically mentioned that "some companies have proposed to build their own 5G enterprise private networks, and it is necessary to consider the frequency planning and management of private networks as well as interference coordination."

Many applications of telemedicine, unmanned driving, robots, and industrial Internet involve industrial safety, personal safety, privacy protection, and ethics, which go beyond the content of existing legal regulations. It is necessary to accelerate the improvement of the legal and regulatory system related to 5G applications.

Existing industry terminals are based on 5G CPE, which makes it difficult to truly realize 5G application effects. There is a need for 5G industry modules and chips with rich specifications and varieties, and the multi-scenario adaptability of the modules needs to be enhanced to reduce costs.

The fifth challenge is safety and reliability.

• Virtualization - Virtualization blurs the physical boundaries of the network. Virtual security domains change dynamically, and traditional security mechanisms that rely on physical boundary protection are difficult to work. Control systems are easily targeted by network security attacks, and the sharing of underlying network resources will challenge security isolation.
• Openness - 5G is open to customers to customize and deploy services, and malicious third parties can easily gain control over the network. 5G uses universal Internet protocols instead of traditional mobile network dedicated protocols, which expands business capabilities but makes it more vulnerable to external attacks.
• Slicing - An effective security isolation mechanism is required between slices to prevent a network slice with low protection capabilities from being used as a springboard to affect other slices after being attacked.
• Large connections: Large connections that are always online can easily become a springboard for DDoS attacks. Anti-intrusion capabilities are limited by low-power algorithms. Large connection authentication can trigger signaling storms and affect latency. The Internet of Vehicles also requires support for point-to-multipoint V2V fast authentication.

Many 5G software will be open source, and excessive reliance on third-party open source libraries will increase the risk of introducing security vulnerabilities.

• Open source - Open source software is overly dependent on third-party open source basic libraries, increasing the risk of introducing security vulnerabilities.
• Big data - Training neural networks with distorted data will lead to incorrect decisions and be difficult to detect due to the unexplainable nature of AI results.

"Although 5G faces many challenges, it also has opportunities. 5G will give rise to new business forms." Wu Hequan pointed out that new business forms of mobile communications are born after the network capabilities are available, and 5G will definitely produce new applications that we cannot imagine now. IHS Market predicts that by 2035, China's GDP will increase by more than 1 trillion US dollars due to 5G!"

Finally, Wu Hequan called for the high pressure of initial investment in 5G construction, and it would be difficult to talk about the return on investment if the mobile communication network and users did not reach a certain scale. As a new infrastructure, 5G not only requires the operators to take responsibility, but also requires the joint efforts of all parties in the industry chain and the strong support of government policies.