Talk 2: Evolution of Air Interface Towards 5G by Dr. Surva Sekhar Das

Air Interface is one of the most important elements that differentiate between 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. While 3G was CDMA based, 4G was OFDMA based; the lectures reveal the contents of air interface for 5G.

While 4G brought in a deluge of infotainment services, 5G aims to provide extremely low delay services, great service in crowd, enhanced mobile broadband (virtual reality being made real), ultra reliable and secure connectivity, ubiquitous QoS, and highly energy efficient networks.
The above mentioned requirements are expected to be met by several advancement in technologies such as (i) new waveforms (termed as 5G NR, the new radio), (ii) millimeter wave technology, (iii) massive multiple antenna technologies (iv) non orthogonal multiple access (v) heterogeneous networks such as small cells and device to device communications (vi) energy savings in radio access network and (vii) ubiquitous quality of service among others.

In the lectures we aim to provide insight into the fundamentals of the above mentioned methods, which are essential components of 5G Air Interface. We will begin with an overview of 5G technology aspects. The lectures will span radio access technology, 5G new radio waveform, its genesis and variants, non orthogonal multiple access scheme, aspects of mmwave communication technology. Massive MIMO will also be addressed. The propagation models which are essential for performance analysis will also be briefly touched upon. We will also discuss analysis of heterogeneous networks including small cells and device to device communication. We will present energy saving methods for radio access network through multi objective optimization. Finally we will touch performance characterization of QoS for delay sensitive traffic for radio access networks.

The intended audience includes research scholars who are interested to pursue 5G and beyond technologies to bring improvement in performance, which can make these technologies even more commercially viable.

Dr. Suvra Sekhar Das, is currently serving as associate professor in the G. S. Sanyal School of Telecommunications at IIT Kharagpur. He has authored 3 books in the domain of Air Interface for 4G 5G. He has 10 patents in the domain of wireless communications. He has more than 75 publications in International journals and conferences. He has developed several massive online open course ware and virtual laboratories which are widely used resources for developing expertise in the design and development of wireless communication systems. He has led several sponsored research and consultancy projects funded by ministry of information and communication technology, ISRO, HAL, BEL, Vodafone, Aricent, Reliance. Before joining IIT kharagpur he had been with the Innovations lab, TCS as senior scientist. He has obtained his PhD from Aalborg University, Denmark. His research area includes Radio Access Technology Radio Access Networks, especially focusing on system level performance analysis of wireless communication systems as well as waveform design for modern wireless systems.