A brief history of the development of mobile communication technology

The 5G era is just around the corner, and it promises to bring a host of exciting services and features. There have been a lot of technical articles about 5G, but before we get into that, let’s take a look back at the development of mobile communications over the past few decades.

Each generation of mobile technology takes about 10 years to develop, but each platform has continuous innovations that lead us to the next platform. For example, the large-scale Internet of Things functions that 5G will support have already appeared in 4G.

1G mobile communications were voice-centric, based on analog and cellular technology, and had their glory days in the 1980s. They were very limited in functionality and only served markets such as the military, government agencies, and celebrities. There was no universal mobile communications standard at the time, and most countries developed their own 1G communications models, which meant that mobile devices would not work properly when you moved from one country to another.

The evolution of mobile technology

The evolution to 2G in the early 1990s brought us two major advantages. First, market expansion, from niche customers to mass customers. Second, the advancement from analog technology to digital technology. GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) was mainly established for the standardization of 2G mobile communication technology in Europe. GSM was widely accepted in Europe and other regions, surpassing other 2G technologies such as CDMA and PDC.

By the late 1990s, the 2G market had become more mature and saturated. Intense competition had led to lower revenues for mobile service providers, who saw the future of mobile growth as primarily in delivering multimedia services over the Internet. Japan's NTT Docomo (the world's largest operator at the time) took the lead in implementing 3G with the new WCDMA technology. This was a great innovation for operators who were using GSM's TDMA technology at the time. GSM operators initially introduced GPRS and later EDGE technology as a migration path to 3G, which the industry referred to as 2.5G. 2.5G technology enabled GSM operators to offer simple data services at low bit rates, which eventually became widely used in 3G.

Service providers started adopting 3G in the early 2000s, initially driven by WCDMA and CDMA2000 technologies. 3G provided significant improvements in voice and data capacity, and WCDMA later evolved into HSPA to match the speeds provided by CDMA2000. The major change brought by 3GPP Release 4 was to move mobile communications off E1/T1 lines and transport traffic within IP packets, which was the first version of control/user plane separation, where the CS core was split into MSS (MSC Server) for the control plane and MGW (Media Gateway) for the user plane.

The mobile market was separate from the computer industry even in the 3G era. People used computers to access the internet and mobile devices for voice and simple data services such as SMS. As the internet became more widespread and online content became more popular, many services could be provided to mobile devices with the right technology. 4G technology came into being with a focus on increasing data and voice capacity and improving the overall quality of experience. WiMAX and LTE are two systems that offer 4G technology, both are based on similar technologies, but operators around the world are preferring LTE to WiMAX. 4G introduced an all-IP system that completely eliminated circuit switching technology, it used OFDMA to improve spectrum efficiency, and new 4G components such as MIMO and carrier aggregation further increased the overall network capacity. With the increased amount of bandwidth and reduced latency, 4G can offer many additional services such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi).

5G is being developed to enhance the experience of mobile devices and the entire communication technology ecosystem, including the Internet of Things (IoT), vehicle-to-everything (V2X), and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) experiences. It marks the convergence of many vertical industries such as healthcare, agriculture, and automotive. The network architecture has changed to make it simpler and more efficient. Another important addition to 5G is support for ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) devices, which are used for remote surgery applications and critical industrial automation. It is expected that the network latency of 5G will be less than 1 millisecond to support URLLC devices.

The 5G architecture is designed to support cloud native and promote the development of SDN and virtualization technologies to create an operationally flexible and programmable network. It attempts to minimize the dependencies between hardware and software components of the access and core networks and network functions. Control plane and user plane separation (CUPS) provides much-needed architectural enhancements to separate user signaling and data traffic.

5G also introduces network slicing, through which the physical network infrastructure can be divided into multiple virtual networks, enabling operators to provide specific types of support to specific user groups. For example, vehicle-to-vehicle communication requires high mobility and low bandwidth, while mobile broadband to fixed locations requires high bandwidth but low mobility. Network slicing can help operators allocate different resources for different needs. Another important aspect is multi-connectivity, which is the ability to support different access types from wireless to core services, including 5G, LTE, WiFi and even fixed access, served by the same network. Network slicing and multi-connectivity ensure that 5G becomes a single network infrastructure that can meet multiple service needs.