5G is the Key to the Industrial Internet

Technology drives the creation of the market and also creates history. The maturity of 5G technology and the arrival of the era of Internet of Everything will give telecom operators a new role and positioning. Starting from this issue, this newspaper will discuss in stages how telecom operators can complete the positioning and transformation of their roles in the 5G era.

Although no country has achieved full 5G coverage, this does not affect countries around the world to elevate 5G as a national strategy. 5G will determine the position of countries in the world competition in the future. It has become a global consensus that whoever grasps 5G first will hold the lifeblood of the times.

But why 5G? Why is 5G so powerful? The ministry of industry and information technology held a national field work conference on "5G+ industrial Internet" on August 12, stressing that manufacturing is the foundation of a country, the foundation of a strong country and the main battlefield supporting high-quality economic development. As an important cornerstone of the fourth industrial revolution and a key supporting force of digital transformation, the industrial Internet has opened up a new track of scientific and technological competition and industrial competition.

Exclusive "three-piece set"

In 2019, 5G is a high-light word, and people are familiar with its three characteristics.

The international telecommunication union (ITU) defines three application scenarios for 5G in terms of rate, number of connections, and delay: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine communication (mMTC), and ultra-high reliability and low delay communication (uRLLC).

The chairman of the China Internet association and China academy of engineering Wuhequan further interpretation of the three characteristics is that the peak rate of 5G to 30 times higher than that of 4G. User experience rate increased by 10 times and spectrum efficiency increased by 3 times. Mobility can reach 500 km/h and wireless interface delay reduced by 90%. The connection density reaches 1 square kilometers and 1 million Internet module connected to the Internet, energy and density are improved 100 times. High bandwidth, low delay and large connection have become the exclusive "three-piece set" of 5G.

These three characteristics not only meet the needs of consumer applications in the era of 3G and 4G, but also meet the needs of industrial applications to realize the penetration of mobile network into industrial production and the transformation to the Internet of everything. When the fourth industrial revolution comes, 5G is worthy of the key.

"Life-saver" for the industrial Internet

Industry has always been an important factor in measuring a country's overall strength.

Whatever industrial 4.0 or digital industry, most basic requirement is digitalization of equipment and networking of CNC lathes. However, the reality is that although optical fiber is the best choice, in some old enterprises and old factories, it is difficult to put optical fibers into it. However, the existing wireless technologies such as WiFi have a utilization rate of only 6% in the industrial field because of the poor scalability and anti-interference ability, and the motor and the electric spark in the workshop may interfere with it.

The industrial Internet includes three major systems: network, platform and security. Among them, the network is the foundation, the platform is the core, and security is the guarantee. Wuhequan said that for the Industrial Internet, 5G is the life-saver. 5G is designed for the industrial Internet. If the factory wants to build a 5G private network, according to ETEI calculation, it needs about 76 megabytes of bandwidth, but it needs to apply for special frequency to relevant departments. More enterprises may directly rely on operators, adopt operators' 5G networks, and even control functions , network capabilities, and private network capabilities are handed over to operators.

This is a huge cake. The industry expects that China's industrial Internet market will exceed 600 billion yuan in 2019, and the compound annual growth rate is expected to be about 13.32%. Many countries have issued opinions, plans, guidelines or implementation plans for promoting the industrial Internet. The good pattern of all-round development of industrial Internet, such as central deployment, local promotion, and enterprise response, has basically taken shape.

Opening core network architecture

In fact, in addition to enabling industrial Internet, the arrival of 5G makes communication technology enter the whole social production field for the first time. It not only promotes the transformation and upgrading of all walks of life towards the direction of digitization and intelligence, but also promotes the wisdom and efficiency of social governance and urban management. The reason why 5G has such great power is that the core network architecture in the 5G era has moved from closed to open. Through the comprehensive cloud transformation of the network, it has the ability to be more open, and operators will be connected more closely with various industries than ever before, which will cross-empower and give rise to a new industrial ecology.

Wei Leping, executive deputy director of the Communication Technology Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and director of the China Telecom Group Science and Technology Committee, said that from 1G to 4G, all are closed network architectures, and 5G is an open architecture. This is a fundamental change.

Software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies commonly used in 5G network architecture are first used in the transformation and upgrading of fixed-line broadband, aiming at solving the rigid system caused by the soft and hard integration of traditional communication networks. However, when designing a 5G network, in order to meet the needs of supporting different scenarios at the same time, it is also necessary to have a flexible and on-demand IT service core network architecture. Therefore, it is natural for 5G to adopt technologies such as SDN and NFV.

Wang Zhiqin, an expert at the Institute of Information and Communication, said that unlike the past, 5G hardware uses a common server architecture and software defines network functions. The future 5G core network is based on data centers and has no switches. In the 5G core network, the Http protocol that is connected with the Internet is completely used to complete the service scheduling, which is a special 'tunnel' built in the general Internet and a set of special protocols for mobile communication.

A new era of cloud network integration

The superposition of network, terminal and application innovation has launched the two rounds technology wave of Internet and mobile Internet, followed by the era of 5G, the era of cloud, and the era of integration of cloud and network.

Ke Ruiwen, chairman of China Telecom, said in the recent MWC that 5G accelerates cloud network integration and cloud network integration gives more meaning to 5G. The two are symbiotic, complementary and mutually reinforcing.

5G is a communication technology of natural architecture in cloud computing. The deployment of 5G network elements in natural cloud requires rich and complete optical network resources and cloud/DC (data center) resources. The MEC-based edge cloud architecture is the key to comprehensive cloudization of 5G network. Therefore, only the deep integration of cloud networks can promote the rapid and healthy development of 5G.

On the other hand, the development of 5G promotes the deep integration of cloud networks. 5G has the characteristics of high speed, large capacity, low latency and full cloud of the core network, and is an important driving force for deep integration of cloud networks. For example, in the 5G important feature-network slicing, 5G, NB-IoT, optical network, cloud resource pool, etc. can be packaged into a unified slice through unified orchestration, and the application platform such as the open Internet of Things capability open platform and big data analysis platform can be superimposed to provide partners with new and differentiated services.