S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA
In the era of smart everything where devices are getting smarter and everything is connected, starting from sensors to supercomputers, the convergence of 5G, IoT, and AI is driving multiple industries to transform. With this there are increasing complexities surrounding system-on-chip (SoC) architectures, the gamut of modern chip design and verification methodologies has evolved immensely to meet demanding and changing operating needs related to power.
5G is already here, taking factory automation to the next level, bringing high speed mobile internet and using IoT to improve road safety by connecting devices, machines, businesses, and people. We see this transformation in retail, automotive, factories, homes, and our cities. In the market of rapid change, it’s common that the product requirements undergo significant modifications several times over the course of the development of the product, resulting in constant changes to the IP needs.
As high-performance processor architectures, software, and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to enable the era of smart everything, faster computation to fuel data-intensive applications has emerged as the need of the moment. Be it image recognition, virtual reality, mobile applications, next-gen networking, or autonomous driving, the success of the underlying silicon to drive these advanced technologies relies heavily on the hardware’s ability to process large amounts of data. But, given the constraints of silicon technologies not to mention bigger picture environmental issues in some cases - it must be done with optimal power consumption.
There is an increasing amount of push for intelligence as the edge has made it even more difficult to manage and sustain the power-hungry winds of change. IoT, AI, smart buildings, self-driving cars, automated factories, AR/VR experiences, ultra-HD live streaming, telesurgery, etc. are all being made possible thanks to the 5G network’s Enhanced Mobile Broadband (EMBB), Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) & Machine Machine-type Communication (MMTC).
As more service providers move toward 5G, they need a scalable, secure, cloud-native infrastructure that they, and their customers, can rely on. The standalone 5G Core eliminates the hardware-centric, centralized architectures of the past and embraces a cloud-native, distributed infrastructure for building and operating networks. The approach uses microservices, running on a service-based, containerized architecture that enables service delivery all the way to the far edge of the network. This creates the faster, more reliable network performance that customers demand.
At the same time, AI helps to obtain efficient resource scheduling strategies in a complex environment with heterogeneous resources and a massive number of devices, while meeting the ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability requirements of novel applications, e.g., self-driving cars, remote operation, intelligent transport systems, Industry 4.0, smart energy, e-health, and AR/VR services. By integrating AI functions into edge networks, radio networks become service-aware and resource-aware to have a full insight into the operating environment and can adapt resource allocation/orchestration in a dynamic manner.
5G is a promise to Indians to connect virtually everyone and everything, and will enable new services and use cases for consumers, enterprises and society at large. This will open up new revenue streams targeting use cases across different industry verticals. 5G has a huge potential for value creation in India and will create a paradigm shift for the industry and consumers. It will be the foundation for Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) and unleash a range of business opportunities for the enterprise segments like healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture with its high data rates, low latency and the ability to connect millions of IoT devices and sensors. 5G will also be one of the biggest enablers for the Government of India’s vision of Digital India.”
The key towards maximising 5G is the ability to bring deep understanding not only of how the radio network is performing but also how the cloud is performing. On top of it, the ability to allow adjustments to be made to high-value workloads in real-time. This is a vital capability because the efficiency of the cloud will dictate the efficiency with which the entire network is running. This is done through the powerful combination of telco-specific cloud-native solution and cloud-first automation, coupled with consistent infrastructure and holistic assurance.
However, the year 2020, was a year marked with the pandemic, bringing India and the entire world to a standstill which further pushed the date of the 5G India launch. Thereafter, in 2021, a parliamentary panel report on the status of 5G in India concluded that ‘sufficient preparatory work has not been undertaken for launching 5G services in India’.
Tech Pundits feels that 5G is still in its building phase and might take time to reach across the country. It is going to take another 2-3 years for 5G rollout, while in the meantime 4G is definitely here to stay and complement its counterpart. Telecoms are geared to meet challenges related to 5G technology. Ingredients to make 5G successful are device availability and the right spectrum charges making faster wireless speed available to the common users.
Finally, we need a lot of effort to create a fiberized network. Once we are able to do this, then we can create a very flexible software stack on top of it which will make the network programmable. If a method is programmable, utilized well, infrastructure is there to support it, creating a cloud for 5G will need no doubt an effort but its efficiency will start kicking in.
Thanks for sharing your valuable inputs on how the OEMs have supported their state-of-art technologies and at the same time VARs are able to make products available to the last mile. Let’s have a look into this year’s Channel Leadership Survey 2021.
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