Indeed, the university has committed C$1 million towards 5G research projects so as to test the network’s capabilities in real-world scenarios. The eight projects will be funded by Western and carried out at Western’s lab.

Last year, Western had invested C$2.7 million into deploying 5G networks on its campus using five signal towers connected to Bell’s commercial network. Hence, researchers are able to test their ideas in a real-world environment. Western is then the only university in Canada with a fully functional 5G network deployed, allowing researchers to test and develop advanced technologies.

Western researchers are currently working on experiments to tackle pressing societal issues using 5G, including engaging virtual classrooms using virtual reality and improving mental health. These projects are expected to be live-tested in 2022.

The post Western University to work on new 5G projects appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

It all started with 1G when the cell phones were as large as bricks and holding them for long would cause strain on the arms. They used to only provide voice communications. Wider cell phone coverage and the new Messaging service came with 2G and then with 3G, mobile phones started getting connected to the internet with slow and limited bandwidth.

Seeing the value delivery potentials with mobile internet connectivity, the low speed of mobile internet data transfer, and the many lacking features of available phones started to become a pain point for the businesses and the race for higher connection speeds and the new generation of “smart” phones began.

Around 2009, we saw the arrival of 4G (or as some telcos would call it LTE [Long Term Evolution]), which significantly improved the internet connectivity. Mobile phones started ramping up their competition in adding capabilities, processing power, and storage, turning themselves into what we call them today as “Smart Phones”.

Features like video calls, multimedia streaming, live video streaming, on-phone graphic processing, and rendering became possible and the competition for stronger and faster smartphones entered a new stage.

This competition also started kicking a number of other carried devices to the curb, including digital cameras, MP3 players, personal organizers, voice recorders, and even larger devices like desktop scanners, video players, and video game consoles.

As the demand for more mobile features and capabilities expanded both at the consumer and commercial level, the need for data communications at a much higher speed created the push for the innovations needed to pave the road for the arrival of the latest generation: 5G.

The world is now embracing 5G and its multitude of use cases are growing in almost every market sector and function, while the 6G is already in the works and is going through the lab phase.

Compared to 4G/LTE, 5G provides much higher speed – estimated as having 10X less latency, 100X faster speed, and 1000X more capacity – using lower latency and uses higher-frequency radio waves and works with smaller, more closely distributed wireless access points instead of large, dispersed cell towers.

5G allows for higher concurrent connectivity and significantly higher download speeds with unprecedented consistency levels that would allow for Big Data live streaming and on-the-go analytics on them. The speed and capacity of 5G allow for mobile augmented reality (overlaying virtual visual items over a live view of the world).

5G uses shorter range radio waves, which allow the cell towers to significantly improve geolocation tracking with numerous industrial use cases of IoT devices (e.g., in-field Robotics, Agriculture automation, Drone services, Connected Vehicles, Remote Healthcare, Traffic management, and more). This is only going to grow larger as research shows that by 2023 the number of connected IoT devices would surpass 20 billion.

It is also predicted that the 1 million global 5G subscribers that existed in 2019 will grow beyond 1 billion by end of 2023.

4G/LTE enabled a mobile ecosystem of around $4 trillion in new economic value, and we foresee 5G to break that record by 2.5x within the next 5 years.

5G networks rely on smaller, yet more densely-deployed, antennae, most attached not to giant cell towers but to existing buildings, light poles, and other physical infrastructure. This densifying of the network, allows the signals to be carried faster and more reliably, with bandwidth measured not in megabits but rather in gigabits per second.

This unprecedented high level of connectivity in speed, density, and capacity will forever shift all existing telecom architectural designs and will create sectors that did not exist before or could not manifest using 4G/LTE.

What is Cloudification?

Cloudification is the process of migrating existing platforms and solutions to a Cloud service provider’s environment to benefit from their global, low-latency, high availability, elastic service capacity and to gain access to their large inventory of ready tools and services covering a wide range of functions, from big data streaming and analytics to Machine Learning.

Cloud services provide the required globally distributed infrastructure and network at a much higher speed of provisioning for a fraction of the cost of ownership that enterprises would incur if they tried to expand their data centers worldwide.

They have revolutionised the way enterprises do innovations by significantly lowering the cost and time barrier for experimentations and enabling teams to set up labs and test their hypothesis in a matter of minutes, record the outcomes and then release the resources that are no longer required back to the Cloud provider and off of their bills.

In fact, the speed at which new data is being created and the sheer volume of it would have completely paralysed enterprises if they did not have access to Cloud data communications bandwidth and big data storage for such low prices.

Two-thirds of the world’s data didn’t exist five years ago, and it is estimated that more than 70 exabytes of data will be generated by 2022 (One exabyte is the equivalent of one billion gigabytes) that is why it is estimated that the investment in Cloudification will surpass $270 billion by 2025.

Cloudification brings several key technological benefits to a network, including:

• Software-Defined Infrastructure: High agility environments that are programmable and break the limitations of the hardware.
• Network Function Virtualization: Running the building blocks of networking on software to bring higher flexibility and demand adaptability.
• Network Slicing: Creating customized end-to-end dynamic virtual networks to respond to the diverse needs of industry-specific use cases.
• Self-Managed Networks: Autonomous, Intelligent and Flexible networks that raise the efficiency of services and optimize the costs of communications.
• Distributed Computing: moving the computations from the Cloud data centers, through the network, to the Edge and putting the workload where it delivers the most value through field-positioned processing and near-zero latency in decision making.
• Multi-vector Manufacturing Optimization: providing Ultra-Low Latency, Ultra Reliability, and High Volume Communication for a variety of manufacturing use cases through collecting data from several points in assembly lines and allowing for high speed and reliable data connectivity between the machines and analytical engines. This in turn supports smart decision-making during the production and servicing and maintenance stages.

Cloudified 5G Networks 

Cloudification of 5G networks is already underway and has already shown great benefits from orchestrating a scalable, secure, low-latency, globally accessible, software-driven network.

It is predicted that the industry digitalization investment in 5G will exceed $700 billion by 2030 supported by several market sectors, including Retail, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Automotive, Public Transportation, Healthcare, Energy & Utilities, Finance, Media & Entertainment, and Public Safety.

Data usage at a global level is expected to become 10x by 2025 as consumers see value in 5G use cases and will be willing to pay for it.

5G-powered industrial use cases are expanding and have already engaged in:

• Connected Vehicles (Vehicle-to-Everything [V2X] connectivity)
• Real-time automation
• Remote Operations
• Autonomous Robotics
• Augmented Reality
• Connected Healthcare
• Enhance live-video services (5G MEC)
• Smart surveillance and Fraud Detection / Prevention
• Predictive and Live Hazard Management and Maintenance
• Monitoring and tracking
• Smart Automated Call Centers
• Smart Cities (all aspects, from traffic management to power consumption)

Cloudification of 5G networks leads to:

• Reimagining (and improving) customer experience and creating and delivering personalized experiences to exceed customer expectations.
• Accelerating time-to-market (as leveraging Cloud service is much faster and cheaper than the traditional ways of deployment) and automating BSS/OSS processes to drive efficiency.
• Higher Operational Efficiency and enhanced business outcomes (through automating software-driven networks and being able to pay for what is used and to scale up to respond to spikes in demands – or as prescribed by predictive AI – and reducing the allocated capacity when demand drops, to optimize spending).
• Better orchestration and optimization of the network components (through API-based automation of management, monitoring, and maintenance of the networks with top-to-bottom and cross-silo visibility).
• Unlocking growth potentials and monetizing the 5G capabilities in conjunction with Edge and IoT technologies.

Cloudification of 5g networks addresses these challenges:

• Breaking out the exponential increase of data in radio and transport for Edge computing.
• The rising complexity of orchestration due to the growing diversity of digital ecosystems.
• Digitalization of mobile service offerings beyond mere mobile customers connectivity and expanding into further innovative uses, especially real-time AI-based analytics on live real-time big data streaming coming from thousands of connected devices in the field.
• The need for 5G Slicing (creating and offering 5G Private Networks to business users).
• Alignment at all levels and all functions (from Executive to Staff and from Tech to Business).

Over the past 10 years, many Telco’s started moving some of their infrastructures and applications to the Cloud, but it has been only the past couple of years when they partnered with Cloud service providers in establishing integrated 5G solutions on Cloud.

This had led to the creation of Software-Centric infrastructures and Developer-Friendly Ecosystems to make innovative 5G applications and to help other industries and verticals to leverage the power of 5G and the Cloud to disrupt their own sectors.

A great advantage of this approach is that it allows developers to use the same programming tools and development environments and even the same APIs to create solutions for the 5G network and Cloud environment. It also allows the consumers of 5G services to customize their network experience on-demand.

This movement has contributed to a leaner product portfolio, higher organizational agility, increased cost efficiency, and the formation of modern, Cloud-Native architectures established on elastic agile IT models.

The Cloud-Native 5G allows for the creation of Slices, which lets organizations have their own Private 5G Networks. This is a new architectural model that was not possible through 4G/LTE.

This also brings the Cloud’s Service Elasticity to 5G. That is the ability to allocate more computing, storage, and networking capacity as demands go up and to reduce it down when the demand drops, and through that to maintain the best customer experience with the most optimized costing.

This also opens the door to getting access to the wealth of tools and capabilities of the Cloud services, including live big data streaming, analytics, machine learning, and more.

Cloud and 5G have created a solution for establishing Global, Secure, Low-Latency, Scalable Software-Driven Telecommunication networks for a fraction of the cost of traditional deployments that simplify service provisioning and allow the Telecom enterprises to better focus on customer experience.

Another growing use of Cloudified 5G Networks is Edge Processing in the Next Generation Robotics. The spike in demand for live connectivity and high bandwidth required for robots in the field, to allow for Edge Processing and communicating of live data back to the organization, has been growing the need for low-latency network connectivity to strong analytical engines and AI-based solutions which require an integration of the Telecom networks and Cloud service providers.

Cloudified 5G and Artificial Intelligence

Over the past couple of years, we have seen a great push for Democratizing Augmented-Intelligence (“Smart Everything Everywhere”).

Studies predict that by 2030 the combined impact of Cloudified 5G and AI will amplify their impact beyond an acceleration expected from either of them.

The massive growth of data is now matched by the extensive power of Cloud, which can provide the large live feed that AI systems require to provide several uses cases, such as:

• Augmented Decision making using the combined power of Prescriptive and Predictive models.
• Rich Media of high resolutions and real-time rendered graphics are used in the entertainment industry, especially in the gaming sector of Augment Reality.
• High-Speed Production using full automation (even at decision-making points), with Predictive Maintenance and live Analytical Optimization.
• Optimized Logistics based on AI-driven Predictive Routing and supply balancing in addition to fleet Predictive Maintenance.

Cloudified 5G accelerates AI deployments by Distributing Intelligence (Geo-Dispersed Smartification) across every existing – or upcoming innovative – user experience in every value delivery pipeline.

Opportunities for the Combined Cloudified 5G/AI impact

Short-Term

The current trends and forecast of its growth are predicting that by 2025, Cloudified 5G and AI will improve world GDP by over $3 trillion through reducing waste, lowering production costs, and optimizing outputs.

• In manufacturing, the combined power of humans and AI (aka the Augmented Intelligence) is already showing great return from combining the human brain’s strength and real-time data to address problems and raise productivity.
• In retail, the shopping experience is going through a major change with the introduction of 3D graphics, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality that delivers frictionless and immersive journeys with high personalization levels. Both in-store and online shopping is going through significant changes. The stores are also benefiting from AI-enhanced supply chain management and logistics. It is estimated that the value of the global “Smart” retail market will amount to $60 billion by 2025.
• In media, live customization of content and fine-targeted advertising is enhancing customer experience and raising revenue with higher conversion rates and lower customer churns.
• In healthcare, practitioners are using a growing number of AI-based “Smart Patient Monitoring” devices that provide remote care for patients. It is expected that the number of these AI-enabled wearables would grow to over 40 million by 2023.
• In urban and national transportation, governments are using fine-grained, real-time data from connected vehicles in their software-driven traffic and routing management to reduce collisions and road corrosions, optimize fuel consumption and visualize road safety and surface quality.

Long-Term

It is expected to see accelerated growth in all areas touched in the short-term moving to a much higher global economic impact (exceeding $18 trillion by 2035).

• In manufacturing, we will have factories that will be fully automated and efficiently connected to their supply chain and can coordinate and optimize their production volume based on real-time data.
• In retail, both the shopping experience and the supply and distribution channels are going to continue experiencing significant improvements. Real-time insights will create “Digital Twins” of the products and services for a remote yet realistic experience. Smart digital signage will create offers and discounts based on recommendation systems that are backed by predictive models. In both physical stores and warehouses, IoT smart devices will help the staff better manage their stacked supplies and have a live view into the exact state of their merchandise and their whereabouts.
• In media, we can expect automated content creation, interactive movies that adjust their story and pace based on the customer’s preference, Virtual Reality in everyday entertainment type, and Augmented Reality as part of everyday life.
• In healthcare, a growing part of services will be automated without human intervention or even supervision. In the areas that would still be dependent – to some extent – on practitioners, they will use Augmented Diagnostics and advanced smart tools to better identify the health issue, set a recovery path, and provide personalized care for the patients.
• In urban and national transportation, governments continue to use the live feed of data in their smart decision making and visualization tools and will expand that into incorporating 3D maps into their drone fleets utilization for urban and inter-city services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudified 5G

At the time of writing this article, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading the charge in Cloudification of 5G while the other providers are in a variety of stages of catching up with the needed depth and breadth of needed technology.

AWS provides the needed infrastructure and tool for incorporating 5G technology in a variety of use cases and provides a large set of solutions to support them.

• AWS Local Zones are Cloud infrastructure and services in large metropolitan areas and are used for service migration and low-latency data processing. They allow for scalable capacity in AWS-managed and operated facilities.
• AWS Outposts are Cloud infrastructure and services that are established on an organization’s data center (on-premises). They are used for service and data migration, integration of critical local apps, and data residency compliance requirements. They provide dedicated capacity in the customer’s data center.
• AWS Wavelength is their infrastructure and service in Telco’s 5G network. They are used for Ultra-low latency, local data processing and provide scalable capacity in Telco’s data center, managed, and supported by AWS.
• AWS EKS Anywhere is their Container Management Services for self-managed infrastructure. Combined with EKS Distro they provide consistent AWS management in brownfield deployments.

AWS has been working closely with a growing list of telecommunications and Digital Media Service Providers in many countries since the inception of 5G. Some of the most prominent partners with AWS are:

• Dish Wireless: has formed a strategic collaboration with AWS to reinvent 5G connectivity and innovation by leveraging AWS infrastructure and services to build a cloud-based, 5G Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN).
• Verizon: the first Telco in the world to launch a commercial 5G mobile network with a commercially available 5G-enabled smartphone.
• Ericsson: one of the leading providers of information and communication technology to service providers. Ericsson has been partnering with a number of other technology organizations in providing 5G technology to consumers.
• Vodafone: a worldwide operating telecommunications company active in 22 countries in 4 continents, which is also partnering with other enterprises in re-imagining the customer experience of mobile technology through 5G.
• T-Mobile: started the journey of business transformation on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2012 and has grown its customer base from 33 million subscribers to 84 million subscribers today.
• Comcast: the world’s largest cable company and the leading U.S. provider of high-speed internet and voice services, use AWS in a hybrid environment to innovate and deploy features for its flagship video product, XFINITY X1.
• Alcatel Lucent: a French global telecommunication solutions provider, created OpenTouch Video Store, an online service for the creation and sharing of video content.

AWS has also established a close working relationship with Ghost Robotics, a manufacturer of durable, continuous use, highly rugged, yet easy to deploy legged robots and is expanding its presence into field operationalized Robotics where sensory and analytical data needs to be in continuous bi-directional flow to support Edge, IoT and live cloud-based AI-enhanced analytical support.

AWS has introduced the use of the Graviton2 processors which are built for compute-intensive applications and can deliver high performance and lower power consumption (40% better pricing performance compared to traditional x86 CPUs). They provide the best-in-class computing units for 5G applications.

Conclusion

The fortunate arrival of 5G at a time when Cloud computing was already a wide-spread practice in both private and public sectors created a combined paradigm-shifting force that is now ramping up towards a complete revolution in our existing connectivity models and is accelerating toward innovative ways that we are yet to envision and implement.

The 5G is here to lift and launch all ideas that 4G/LTE could not embody due to its limited speed and capacity and to shorten the cycle of creativity and monetization of ideas.

All industries and their sectors are either already affected or are going to see positive impacts from the next generation of connectivity. Whether these impacts would properly align towards equal opportunities and facilitation among all nations will yet to unfold into the future.

The world as we used to know merely a couple of years ago will go through such significant changes in this decade that would make us wonder how we used to live and work with such old and slow ways of communication, in a world that lacked such strong smart automation.

Article written by Arman Kamran, CTO of Prima Recon, Professor of Transformative Technologies, Advisory Board Member to The Harvard Business Review, and Enterprise Transition Expert in Scaled Agile Digital Transformation

The post The Cloudification of 5G Networks appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Indeed, it was stated that 5G subscriptions with capable devices are expected to grow by more than 70 million in the first quarter of 2021 and that we should reach 580 million 5G subscriptions by the end of 2021. By 2026, it was reported that North America should be leading the shares of mobile subscriptions that are 5G.

The post 5G devices and services to expand by 2026 appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Indeed, it was reported that Nokia signed an agreement with AWS to collaborate on making Nokia’s 5G virtual RAN and open RAN technologies work with AWS Outposts. Their trials will take place at Nokia’s facilities in Finland.

Hence, this new collaboration will allow service providers and enterprises to use Nokia RAN technologies with other AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Local Zones, among others.

Moreover, Nokia announced that it would also be starting a partnership with Microsoft Azure in order to develop 4G and 5G private wireless solutions for enterprises. Thus, Nokia will combine its mobile network technologies, such as open RAN, Radio Access Controller (RIC), and multi-access edge cloud with the Microsoft Azure Private Edge Zone.

Besides, Nokia will work to integrate its LTE/5G RAN technologies with Azure 4G/5G core so as to support enterprise use cases.

Furthermore, Nokia announced a final collaboration with Google Cloud to create new, cloud-based 5G radio solutions. Hence, they will be working on joining Nokia’s RAN edge cloud technologies and Google Cloud’s edge computing platform and applications ecosystem.

The post Nokia to work with Google, AWS, and Microsoft to extend 5G and cloud services appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Hence, in order to further advance its strategy, Google decided to start a partnership with Intel. This partnership will then aim to offer 5G infrastructure cloud-based capabilities by developing reference architectures and integrated solutions for communications service providers (CSP) for core network functions and edge network solutions.

This is an essential mission for Google as 5G is quickly moving to a cloud-native architecture that will enable many features and services, such as network slicing, IoT, quality of service, mobile edge, among others.

By doing so, Google could add large-scale deployment to its platform and get more investments for more generic enterprise services, as well as leverage critical services. Working with Intel will give Google a good start to make the transition for potential customers to its services fairly transparent, as well as leveraging Intel customers for a “fast-start” capability. It also offers Google a certain level of credibility.

Hence, Google plans to work with Intel on three key points of CSP solutions:

• Providing next-generation infrastructure and hardware systems for VRAN and ORAN solutions;
• Creating a lab environment where CSPs can develop their solutions,
• Enabling easier deployments to the edge.

Therefore, this partnership will give Google what it needs to establish itself in this marketplace.

The post Google to offer 5G infrastructure cloud-based capabilities appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu, who, according to their website, canonical.com, is, “an open source software platform that runs everywhere from the Internet of Things to the cloud.”

As part of BT’s Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) program, Canonical will provide open source virtual infrastructure manager (VIM). It will also help with a cloud-based Core network.

Staying ahead of the game

By using the software firm’s open source ‘cloud-native’ foundation, BT hopes it will be able to stay ahead of customer demand with a more scalable and resilient network. The telecommunication company also aims to cover network technologies, including mobile, Wi-Fi and fixed, into one easier to manage customer experience.

In choosing this type of software platform, BT is also planning to increase the speed at which they can build and deploy their 5G services.

Neil McRae, BT Group Chief Architect has commented on the decision, saying that using this software enables developers to create innovative apps that benefit both customers and the company alike.  He says, “Using open source, we are building out our cloud and edge computing platforms to deliver really scalable technology at the edge of the network.”

“elastic, scalable, manageable”

McRae also spoke of the other advantages of using cloud, including its flexibility and creativity. The chief architect added: “The beauty of this platform is that it’s elastic, scalable, manageable and can add features quickly – and the Canonical team are helping us work out how to use this. The team understands that we need to move quickly, but that the platform has to be reliable. I want us to have a platform which enables developers to create apps that people never knew they needed but could never live without.”

In discussing the collaboration with BT, McRae says that they have a “shared vision” and that “With some of the largest telco deployments behind them and a strong expertise in the industry, Canonical really understood the challenges we face as a telco and what we needed to do to realise our vision.”

The post BT choose Canonical to enable its 5G cloud core appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

However, whatever the opinion, experts predict that 5G will be a part of our lives whether we want it to be or not. This will be through the way that smart cities will combine the fifth generation of mobile networks with cloud computing to create a data and storage system that is hoped to benefit the lives of residents and industries.

John Buni, CEO & co-founder of CleanCloud says, “[With] the sheer amount of data generated and collected by smart cities (and six billion are predicted to live in smart cities by 2045), it will be vitally important to have adequate computing capacity.”

Trusting smart cities

However, Buni goes on to say that predictions of smart cities are often too pessimistic and that more trust needs to be put into them. He added that using cloud computing within smart cities will promise “flexibility and a safety net for data”.

He continues to speak of what using the cloud will mean to smart cities, saying: “Each city will have a cloud, and that cloud will store and analyse all the data used in that city, whether it relates to autonomous vehicles or vertical farms.”

Extra benefits of using cloud computing

The CleanCloud CEO added that if a device is lost—say, a laptop or a phone—its details will be recoverable from the cloud, creating an extra level of storage and security for citizens.

In fact, he argues, cloud use may become so prevalent that we will ‘be able to drop descriptors like “as-a-service”‘, which indicate that something—software, for instance—sits in the cloud. We currently use terms like SaaS, along with infrastructure-as-service and platform-as-a-service, to differentiate these models from their more-traditional counterparts. When cloud services are the norm, in other words, ‘”software-as-a-service” would simply be called “software”,’ he says. ‘The cloud element will be taken for granted.’

It’s thought that the business sector will also gain from this setup. “Indeed, some have speculated that the cloud will become so fundamental to software that we’ll be able to drop descriptors like ‘as-a-service’: software-as-a-service will just become software; the cloud element will be taken for granted.” Says Buni.

5G has been launched by telecom companies globally this summer and is available in 6 cities across the UK.

The post What cloud computing means for the future of smart cities appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

In the past, only a handful of established device makers were able to create blockbuster gadgets for world markets. But that’s changing. With the advent on IoT, hundreds of small start-ups are trying to cash-in and mimic the big manufacturers and bring new devices to global markets at a fraction of the price. Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter are flooded by these projects.

But, competition is tough and making a connected consumer product for global distribution is not easy. So, how can devise makers speed up the time to market without jeopardising the quality and user experience of their products?

Designing a connected product requires specialist expertise in an antenna, EMC, mechanics and thermal design, and calls for time-consuming prototyping and testing. Let’s delve deeper.

Antenna requirements

Nowadays, many devices feature metal casings, which is a very challenging operating environment for an antenna. Antennas are found in increasingly smaller devices and in devices held near or inside a human body. Hearing aids, smart watches sensors, smart rings are typical examples.

The small size of the device and the proximity of the human body put special high demands on the concept of an antenna. Antennas require high efficiency and design for high-frequency 5G devices is really challenging. Propagation, range and carrying capabilities at high frequency are lower and that poses a profound demand on manufacturers. In antenna design, requirements vary by country and region and compliance with official requirements requires special expertise in design.

EMC solutions

The operating environment for smart devices is becoming more demanding as the volume (quantities) is growing. Devices should not interfere with signals from other devices or interfere with others. Such reliability is particularly important in health and military environments, but also in standard mobile devices for the consumer. A touchscreen often causes interference with the receiver.

Designing effective EMC solutions has traditionally been hit and miss and rely on hope that it will somehow work. Through simulations, the design process can be undertaken in a precise and controlled way. Typically, a device maker understands its EMC design needs only after the build phase when the problem is detected. With simulations and lab measurements, the problem can be analyzed early and accurately.

Thermal simulations

More and more power is required from devices, leading to more powerful batteries and processors. LED displays tend to heat up especially in handheld devices, and this often causes problems with user safety and comfort. There is also a set of specifications for the warming of the equipment that manufacturers have to conform to in order to get a product on the market. Of course, it is far more effective to design a device according to a specification from the beginning than to hope that an already made design conforms to a specification.

Simulations can be used to find at an early stage what solution will work and what will not. In most cases, simulations are applied for corrections to the existing design to match the specification. Also, the power consumption of 5G base stations is really high, which also requires accurate thermal design to prevent cooling problems.

Mechanics

Equipment transported can carry more than before, meaning they have to endure a wide variety of applications in environments. For example, the wearable sector’s growth is reflected in this trend. Various devices must withstand body moisture, underwater use and other challenging conditions. For example, simulation of drop, vibration and seal tests can be used to avoid large and costly prototype cycles that are often needed to make durable products. Assembly simulations such be used to avoid assembly problems.

Abstracts

Start-up equipment manufacturers often take a reverse approach to device design. It’s not unusual for them to take a cheap Chinese bulk antenna only to discover after extensive and costly prototype rounds and testing that it does not work at all.

This “instant” engineering approach often proves more expensive than if the antenna was custom designed to fit the device right from the start. The same can be said for every other design area. Early phase engineering should be taken into account first in the product development process. It will save both time and money. Simulations and virtual prototypes can also be used to effectively compare different concepts such as component changes.

Written by Tatu Karvinen, Managing Director, Convergentia

The post Can start-up device makers tap into IoT? appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The post Manchester scientists design graphene sensors embedded into RFIDs appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

In a bid for the EU to become the future mobile networking technology, the republic of San Marino has announced its plans, allowing 30,000 residents to enjoy more reliable internet through 5G by the beginning of next year.

Telecom Italia Mobile has agreed to support San Marino’s government ideas by combining collective resources on potential 5G mobile networks across the EU, and signing a ministerial declaration to join member states.

‘Using 5G networks to communicate in the future’

Urve Palo, Estonian Minister for entrepreneurship and IT said to a Computer Weekly: “Everybody and everything will be using 5G networks to communicate in the future, and I am very glad that we managed to sign the declaration.

“This indicates that all member states are thinking about the future and are willing to boost connectivity and Europe’s digital competitiveness to the next level. 5G will allow faster internet connections across Europe and make it possible to develop new technologies, such as connected cars, innovative industrial machines and e-health initiatives.”

The declaration was also signed by Norway and the UK.

Written by Leah Alger

Read more from DevOps Online | Follow us on Twitter

The post Europe promise 5G revolution appeared first on DevOps Online North America.