IEEE Future Directions
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Over the last 150 years communication infrastructures have become more and more pervasive to the point that most of the time people no longer take notice. One is now becoming aware of a communications infrastructure in those rare situations where … there is no communications infrastructure.
The increased processing capabilities, in networks but even more important in our hands, has enabled the use of higher and higher radio frequencies. Actually, new research projects, that are starting in Finland, Far East Asia and US are addressing the THz space, an area that is getting closer to optical communications than radio communications (1THz is 1,000 times the GSM frequency and just 380 times less than visible light frequency) and that will eventually remove any boundaries to networks capacity.
The very concept of network infrastructure will be fading away, replaced by a ubiquitous communication fabric with unbounded capacity.
What bits did to atoms, shifting value to the economy of abundance, these communications fabric will do to communications infrastructures.
This is not going to happen anytime soon, although the path is clear. However, it is of crucial importance to address these concepts because something is already happening here and now, and most importantly is affecting business and likely to steer the future of products and services.
Understanding what are the communications paradigms available and how to leverage them, understanding where 5G can make a difference and realising that 5G is not just what will be deployed by incumbent telco Operators. Something private/public entities like shops and municipalities, enterprises, not in the telecom biz but interested in local infrastructures because of their business will actually leverage and “deploy” small infrastructures able to aggregate into a communications fabric.
Indeed, in the next decade communications will no longer be something “out-there” that you have to access to ensure your product gets connected to the web or your service can be used; rather designing products and services in a certain way will make them component of a growing mesh network, constituents of a communication fabric.
The Digital Transformation course developed by EIT Digital and IEEE FDC discusses in a pragmatic way all these aspects. A module provides specific grounding to these concepts, another looks at 5G in ways that go beyond what one has heard so far about 5G because in reality 5G is not, should not be, a 4G+1, rather a completely different approach to communication, a forerunner to 6G and then 7G that will start, bottom up, designing communications fabric rather than communications infrastructures, where every object will be both a terminal and a network node.
The crucial point is that this future can be built, and will be built today by the companies and business that are embracing the Digital Transformation and for sure one doesn’t want to be left behind.
This communications fabric is discussed in a number of application areas, like healthcare, smart cities, Industry 4.0, since each of them participates in various ways to its exploitation as well as to its development. Clearly, specific and concrete examples are made on 4G and 5G, on VoLTE and Vo5G, including the related economic aspects including interviews to current and potential future players.
