What is 5G technology and how does it work

The term 5G is a commercial term that refers to the fifth generation of wireless telecommunications. From a functional point of view, it refers to mobile telephony and the use, development, and interaction with other technologies such as IoT, Big data, or robotics, while proposing new uses and solutions.

From a technical point of view, 5G will occupy three radio frequency bands – low, medium, and high – and a series of associated technologies: Multiple-Input Multiple-Output or Massive MIMO, centimetric and millimetric waves, small cells or small base stations, full-duplex, beamforming (smart antennas), OFDM, Orthogonal Frequency Domain Multiplexing.

How does 5G technology work? 

A mobile network consists of two important components: the core network and the radio access network.

The main network, at the moment, is made up of fiber optic networks that physically connect the continents and the peninsula with the islands and manage all mobile voice, data, and internet connections.

In the case of 5G, the ‘core network’ is being redesigned for greater integration with the Internet and cloud-based services and will include servers distributed throughout the network (reducing latency) in order to improve, response times.

Many of the advanced features of 5G, including virtualization of network functions and network sharding for different applications and services, will be managed centrally.

Associated Technologies:

The future 5G network will depend on a growing number of base stations and “small cells” with many transmitting and receiving antennas. But in addition, its operation will depend on the ability to direct each electromagnetic wave along a different path.

5G base stations will have many more antennas that will take advantage of the new Massive MIMO technology, and that will be smart antennas, they will make use of Beamforming.

Massive MIMO technology is based on the use of many antennas to transmit and many antennas to receive, hence the name Multiple-Input Multiple-Output or MIMO.

To achieve high transmission speeds, the information is chopped and sent in parallel by each of the antennas in several data streams. This information reaches the receiver through different paths, reflecting off walls, doors, passing through glass, etc., and reaches various antennas in the receiver, thereby multiplying the transmission speed, with the multiplying factor depending on the number of transmitting antennas. and receivers.

With MIMO, you will mainly achieve more speed, but you also have to give more capacity. That is, allow connection to a massive number of devices, without the information being degraded by interference, and there comes the need to use more bands of the spectrum radioelectric.

Beamforming is to direct the radiation and find the most efficient route to transmit data to a particular user and reduce interference for nearby users. With this technology, an attempt is made to focus the sending of information towards the desired user, avoiding sending it in other directions.

The only problem with the 5G technology is that it can create more signal interference through annoying echoes. When a transmitter emits a signal, that signal is much closer to the device’s antenna and therefore stronger than any signal it receives. Expecting an antenna to allow you to talk and listen at the same time is only possible with special echo cancellation technology.