In the past 40 years, mobile communications have experienced leaps and bounds, and have continued to penetrate into every aspect of people’s lives. This has brought profound impact on people’s lifestyles, work patterns, and politics and economy. Users have been pursuing more. High-performance mobile communications network. Presumably everyone has a personal feeling, and the carrier of our communication has long been transformed from text messages and pictures to voice calls, video connections, and all kinds of live broadcasts. At the same time, we’re scanning microblogs, watching videos, and recording live broadcasts. The transmission rate and loading speed requirements are getting higher and higher.
The future of the network will face: 1000 times the data capacity to add, 10 to 100 times the convergence of wireless devices, 10 to 100 times the user rate requirements, 10 times the battery life requirements. Frankly speaking, 4G networks in the next five or six years will not be able to meet these new needs of the Internet. In order to respond to the explosive growth of mobile data traffic, massive device connectivity, and emerging new services and application scenarios, the fifth generation of mobile communications The (5G) system will come into being.
Compared with 4G, 5G has a qualitative leap in the user experience rate, connection number density, end-to-end delay and other performance indicators. Unlike traditional mobile communications, which is based on human beings, 5G considered the interconnection of people and things, and things and things at the beginning of design. It was at the stage when 5G developed to a sufficiently mature stage that it could really help the whole society to build "Internet of Everything." 3GPP has defined three scenarios for e-commerce (e.g., enhanced mobile broadband), mMTC (massive large connectivity), and URLLC (low latency high reliability) for 5G:
Enhanced Mobile Internet Application Scenario (eMBB): 5G can provide higher experience rate and greater bandwidth access capabilities, support higher resolution and experience more vivid multimedia content; for Internet of Things devices interconnection scenario (mMTC) : Mainly for mobile applications such as mobile phones, 5G provides optimized signaling control capabilities at higher connection density, and supports efficient access and management of large-scale, low-cost, low-power IoT (Internet of Things) devices; Vertical Industry Application Scenarios (URLLC) for communications, industrial Internet, etc.: Mainly targeted at private networks such as industrial Internet of things, low latency and highly reliable information interaction capabilities, supporting highly real-time, highly sophisticated, and highly secure business collaboration among connected entities. For the application of real-time, high-precision applications such as car networking.
5G no longer takes the single multiple access technology as the main technical feature, but a set of key technologies to define together, namely large-scale antenna arrays, ultra-dense networking, full spectrum access, new multiple access technologies, and new network architectures. Become the core technology of 5G. The large-scale antenna array supports dozens of independent spatial data streams by increasing the number of antennas on the basis of the existing multiple antennas, thereby improving the spectrum efficiency of the multi-user system several times, and fulfilling the requirements of the capacity and the rate of the 5G system. Important support role. Ultra-dense networking is achieved by increasing the deployment density of base stations, thereby greatly improving frequency reuse efficiency.
The new multiple access technology achieves a significant improvement in system spectrum efficiency and access capabilities in a variety of scenarios by transmitting signals in the air/time/frequency/code domain superposition transmission. Full Spectrum Access refers to the improvement of data transmission rate and system capacity by effectively utilizing various types of mobile communication spectrum (including high and low frequency bands, authorized and unlicensed spectrum, symmetric and asymmetric spectrum, continuous and non-contiguous spectrum, etc.) resources. The new network architecture is a more flexible, intelligent, efficient, and open network system based on SDN (Software-Defined Network), NFV (Network Function Virtualization), and cloud computing technology. It includes three domains: access cloud, control cloud, and forwarding cloud. It can realize high-reliability, low-latency, and even-load efficient transmission of massive service data flows.
Industry Chain Business Model
The advancement of China's 5G technology research and development trials will drive the upgrading of the entire industrial chain including communications, electronic components, chips, and terminal applications. The 5G industry chain consists of upstream base station upgrades (including base station radio frequency, baseband chips, etc.), midstream network construction (network planning and design companies, network optimization/maintenance companies), downstream product applications, and terminal product application scenarios (cloud computing, car networking, and objects Networking, VR/AR), including the raw materials for the devices, base station antennas, small and micro base stations, communication network equipment, fiber optic cables, optical modules, and operators, etc.
Include multiple stakeholders in the 5G ecosystem: Infrastructure Network Vendors, Wireless Network Providers, Mobile Virtual Network Providers (MVNOs), Network Planning/Maintenance Companies, Application Service Providers, End Users, Advertisers Wait. (As shown in Figure 1) In order to meet the large-scale deployment and upgrade of 5G networks, communication service providers need to increase their investment in network infrastructure and bring greater benefits to the infrastructure network equipment vendors. Basic network service providers, network planning and design companies, and network optimization/maintenance companies provide basic network technology services and technical services for communication network engineering construction, maintenance, and optimization.
Users access and use various network services through a 5G network platform (composed of an infrastructure provider, several MVNOs, and network planning/maintenance companies). A large number of user groups attract advertisers to place advertisements. Advertisers communicate their advertisements to users through the platform and sell their products. In addition, 5G network providers have introduced virtual network service providers or application service developers to meet the needs of users in different vertical areas. They have used the virtualization technology and open APIs of the 5G platform to construct distinctive applications and provide networking for specific user groups. Service and charge a fee.
In short, in addition to the programmable hardware infrastructure, 5G network providers have introduced virtual network service providers or application service developers to meet user needs in different vertical areas, using virtualization technologies and open APIs of the 5G platform. The application of structural features provides networking services for specific user groups and charges a certain fee. This way, 5G networks are an open software platform. Finally, users access and use various network services through a 5G network platform (composed of an infrastructure provider and several MVNOs).
The user community can be subdivided into basic users and value-added users. The network subscription fee of the basic user group is usually very low (even zero), so that the 5G open network platform obtains a large number of user groups. Value-added user groups refer to users who are willing to pay extra subscription fees for higher-quality, more-specific online services. A large number of user bases attract advertisers to place advertisements. Advertisers communicate their advertisements to users through the platform and sell their products. Therefore, 5G network is also a media platform. Figure 2 shows the share of the projected revenue of major players in the 5G industry in the coming years, including network operators, network infrastructure equipment manufacturers, and application service providers. It can be seen that in the early stage of commercial use of 5G, operators have started large-scale network construction and the equipment manufacturers' revenue from the investment in 5G network equipment is expected to occupy the highest share. As network deployment continues to improve, network equipment spending by operators is expected to begin to decline. At the same time, with the penetration of 5G applications into vertical industries, the expenditures of various industries on 5G equipment will grow steadily and become the main force driving the growth of income of related equipment manufacturing companies. In the late stage of 5G commercial use, the income of Internet companies and 5G-related information services has increased significantly. Operators started with 5G business, and their share of revenue is expected to maintain a steady upward trend.
5G subdivision industry chain
The 5G industry chain involves a wide range of technologies and has a large market capacity. Next, we will analyze the various sub-industry chains involved in the 5G industry chain from the “upstream†to “downstreamâ€.
Upstream benefit areas
Chip vendors: At present, the international chip makers Qualcomm and Intel respectively grab the "end" and "cloud" two major markets, domestic manufacturers have limited room to benefit. The major chip vendors released a variety of products in the 2017 MWC: First, Qualcomm mastered the key technologies of the ARM architecture that are common to intelligent terminals. From the baseband to the structure, high-end products are fully covered. Recently, Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 835 chip and demonstrated the first network connection based on the 5G NR standard on the chip. Second, Intel has obvious advantages in the cloud application scenario. Its Intel chip of the x86 architecture monopolizes the cloud server market and data center. The share is as high as about 99%. In the future, the commercialization of 5G scale will accelerate the application of mass IoT and other application scenarios. It will be an important trend to use the cloud to process big data and realize information exchange.
Base station antenna: The base station side antenna is an information energy converter between the base station equipment and the end user. Massive MIMO is a core technology of 5G. At present, the antennas of mainstream MIMO base stations are configured as “2 base station antennas + 2 mobile end antennasâ€. With the demand for 5G communication speed enhancement, large-scale antenna arrays will Popularization, capacity allocation is upgraded to "64 base station antennas + 8 mobile end antennas", the number of base station antennas and the market size will grow exponentially, and the market capacity is expected to reach around 20 billion yuan annually. The number of base station antenna manufacturers is very high and the industry competition is fierce. The overseas Kalispell Group and CommScope have maintained a leading position in the world for a long time. The number of local Chinese manufacturers Tongyu Communication Base Station Antennas is in the top ten in the world, and the number of Beijing Communications Communication Base Station antennas is the top three in the world. Compared with the top ten in terms of development shipments, Huawei has also entered the top ten global antenna suppliers.
Base station radio frequency: Radio frequency devices are one of the core components of mobile communication base stations, where the base station filter is responsible for filtering the transmitted and received signals and is a key component of the radio frequency side. The demand for 5G in terms of spectrum efficiency, energy efficiency, and cost efficiency is ten times or even more than a hundred times. The development of 5G key technologies is driving the transformation and development of base station antennas and filter industries. The number of 5G frequency bands will increase from the current 6 to 16 average frequency bands, and the number of frequency bands to be processed by RF modules will increase significantly, which will increase the value of a single RF device and is expected to be 2.5 times that of 4G. In addition, as the difficulty of high-band signal processing and the popularity of carrier aggregation technologies, the performance requirements and number of RF switches and filters have rapidly increased. It is estimated that by 2020, the filter market will reach US$16 billion and the CAGR (a compound annual growth rate) will be approximately 21%.
Communication base station: The existing 4G macro base station is about 3 million (China Mobile 1.43 million, China Telecom 840,000, and China Unicom 700,000). 5G should deploy more base stations, and a single base station is more expensive. 5G base stations include major base station modes such as C-RAN macro base stations, macro base stations, and small base stations. 5G has high-frequency and low-frequency spectrum resources. The macro base station as a low-frequency carrier covers a high cost and is not conducive to resource acquisition. Therefore, the deep coverage of an ultra-dense network small cell will become an important supplement to the macro base station. Small base station coverage increases, and base station manufacturers will benefit greatly.
Midstream beneficiary areas
Optical communication: The network upgrade and expansion drive the growth of the optical communication industry. The optical communication industry can be roughly divided into two branches: the optical module industry chain and the fiber optic cable industry chain.
Optical modules: The telecommunication market upgrades and expansion and the construction of large-scale data centers will develop the dual-stimulus optical device and optical module market. The traditional telecommunication field is an important application field of optical communication modules. Currently, it faces the increasing requirements for the full upgrade of access networks and transmission networks, and the demand for optical modules has increased further in the 5G era. Optical module manufacturers are expected to further benefit. With the continuous growth of data within the data center, ultra-large-scale data centers will be more inclined to choose the leaf spine architecture to ease the core layer of traffic load. In this architecture, the number of network devices and the number of network connections will increase, and the corresponding optical module procurement concentration and demand rate will continue to increase.
Fiber-optic cable: The three major operators continue to purchase, and the fiber-optic cable continues to be booming. We believe that China Mobile should speed up the process of speeding up and build a high-quality wired broadband network. Newly built broadband uses fiber-to-the-home, and in 2017, it will still maintain a relatively high growth in the number of coal mining. China Unicom, under the siege of China Mobile and China Telecom, may have new moves in the market. The continuous collection and production demand of the three major operators will help the optical fiber and cable enterprises maintain a high degree of prosperity.
Network planning and design and network optimization/maintenance company: The 5G network based on SDN, NFV and cloud computing technology is the future development direction of mobile networks, including the three domains of access cloud, control cloud and forwarding cloud. The access cloud supports access to multiple wireless standards and adapts to various types of backhaul links, enabling more flexible network deployment and more efficient wireless resource management. The cloud is controlled to achieve local and global session control, mobility management, and service quality assurance, and an open service-oriented network capability interface is constructed to meet the differentiated service requirements and improve service deployment efficiency. The forwarding cloud is based on a general-purpose hardware platform, and under the control of cloud-efficient network control and resource scheduling, high-reliability, low-latency, and even-load efficient transmission of mass service data flows is realized. With the advancement of 5G network technology, it will inevitably promote the improvement and upgrading of existing network structures. Network planning and design and network optimization/maintenance companies can provide related network technical support, including core networks, wireless networks, and transmission networks. Hierarchical communication network engineering construction, maintenance, optimization and other technical services, and on this basis provide integrated, all-round business support and IT application system solutions to speed up the process of 5G network construction.
Operators: For operators, the 5G era is based on communication technology innovations, and the explosive growth in traffic demand brought by the mobile internet ecosystem is the most direct benefit. From the domestic point of view, the three major operators under the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario are trying to “de-pipe†to seek profit growth under the new business model. China Mobile aims to have 25 million users connected to the OneNET Internet of Things platform; China Unicom plans to launch NB-IoT (narrow-band Internet of Things) outfield scale networking experiments in more than five cities, and build a special network of Shanghai-covered ICTs within the year; The goal of China Telecom is to build five major ecosystems: smart connections, smart homes, Internet finance, emerging ICTs, and the Internet of Things.
Downstream benefit areas
Electronic Terminals: The impact of 5G on consumer electronic terminal products mainly comes from two aspects: First, the impact on signal processing systems in consumer electronics smart terminals, such as RF front-end modules, including antennas, filters, duplexers and other devices; It is the change of the supporting raw material or device that affects the signal processing system, such as the change of products such as the mobile phone case and signal shielding processing device.
Different application scenarios: The commercial application demand promotes the rapid maturation of 5G technology, and 5G technology breakthroughs can also promote commercial applications to break the current bottleneck.
Large bandwidth requirements: In recent years, with the rapid development of optical fiber broadband, the opening of 4G networks, and the popularization of smart terminals, the demand for video playback is also rapidly developing. Video playback has become a lifestyle for people. According to industry forecasts, video traffic will account for more than 95% of network data consumption by 2020. Coupled with the current 4K hardware is mature, 8K technology will become the representative direction of future video technology development. In the development process, 4K/8K video will inevitably put forward higher requirements for operators and even the whole industry chain. The 4K ultra-clear service requires a stable bandwidth of 50 Mbit/s. An average 40 Mbit/s 4G network cannot meet the requirement. The transmission rate of 8K (3D) video still requires about 1 Gbps after being compressed by a factor of 100. The popularity of these services requires the support of a new generation of wireless networks with better performance.
Big connection demand: China Mobile proposes: 5G is designed for the Internet of Everything. The Internet of Things is first to meet the needs for the identification of items and the need to read information. The second is to transfer and share this information through the Internet. The second is the system management and information data analysis brought about by the growth of the Internet of Things, and finally change the company’s Business model and people's life mode to achieve interconnection of all things. In the next ten years, the service users in the Internet of Things will be expanded to users in various industries. The number of M2M terminals will increase dramatically and applications will become ubiquitous. In order to solve the massive wireless communication needs of the Internet of Things, higher data transmission rates, lower end-to-end delays, and greater data bandwidth are necessary, today's 4G networks cannot meet these requirements.
Low latency requirements: To achieve a perfect virtual reality experience for VR (virtual reality), the delay must be less than 20ms to effectively alleviate vertigo, which puts high demands on the performance of the network. In addition to time delay, since the VR device needs to draw a picture finely, a high transmission rate is required to support the transmission of a large amount of data between the helmet and the host. The existing VR devices are limited by the current wireless network transmission speed and transmission delay, and are usually connected by HDMI cables, which greatly limits the user's range of use and affects the user experience. Compared with VR, AR (Augmented Reality) has the advantage that it can be used in any situation. It can play an important role in many fields such as industry, medical care, education, advertising, Internet, games, business communication, social media, and so on. Implementation will inevitably require higher performance 5G networks as support.
The demand for high mobility: The rapid development of high-speed railways and subways has greatly facilitated people's travel. In many cases, we will be in high-mobility situations such as high-speed rail and subway. We hope to have the same business experience in such an environment. For example, we can browse web pages as we like, interact with friends in real time to share current feelings, or handle business operations. However, existing network technologies cannot meet such requirements, which puts forward a new generation of network performance. With high requirements, it is hoped that even in a high mobility environment, higher data transmission rates can be provided, and users can have a better service experience.
In summary, mobile communication systems from 1G to 4G generally follow the same business model based on “meteringâ€, ie, operators invest in spectrum and other assets, build networks, maintain operational capabilities, etc., and build on the user’s usage. Business model to get benefits. The convergence of communications and IT technologies (ie, the IT network of telecommunication networks) has made existing closed wireless networks increasingly becoming an open information service platform, thus requiring new business models and inspiring new applications. Therefore, in addition to researching efficient wireless transmission technologies (such as large-scale antenna arrays, ultra-dense networking, new type multiple access, full spectrum access, etc.), 5G needs to pay attention to new service models and applications and services.
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