Murray Hill, NJ—During my visit to Bell Labs, I had the chance to talk with some of the people doing research on next-generation networking technologies. One of those technologies is the successor to LTE, which they're calling 5G for now. The process for designing the standard is ongoing, but Bell Labs is developing technologies they'd like to see incorporated into the final product.
Some of this tech is an obvious extension of existing infrastructure: smaller cells to prevent congestion and additional spectrum beyond what's used for LTE. But, like many other companies, Alcatel-Lucent (the parent company that runs Bell Labs) is planning ahead for the Internet of Things, where many small devices and sensors get added to cellular networks. And these create some significant problems for current networks, as a demonstration made clear.
Whenever a device appears on existing networks, there's a lot of handshaking that needs to go on to establish a connection, and then a constant background of synchronization traffic. In the context of streaming music or downloading pictures, this ends up being a negligible part of the overall traffic. But minor devices and sensors are "bursty"—they appear on the network briefly to forward information on, and then disappear again in order to save power. In fact, in order to save power by limiting what they have to transmit, the folks at Bell Labs are expecting that they'll ditch most of the handshaking and synchronization protocols.
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