IEEE is kicking off a 5G Initiative with the purpose of engaging professionals worldwide from industry, government, and academia to work to solve the challenges associated with 5G and lay the foundation to realize its many opportunities.
The IEEE 5G Initiative, which includes contributions from many IEEE societies, has several working groups for which it seeks volunteers from both industry and academia to participate.
IEEE 5G Initiative working groups are focused around activities like its 5G Roadmap project, which will identify short (~3 years), mid-term (~5 years), and long-term (~10 years) research, innovation, and technology trends in the communications ecosystem for the purpose of establishing a living document with a clear set of recommendations. Other working groups will develop standards, organize events and conferences such as the IEEE 5G Summits and IEEE 5G World Forum to convene professionals working on 5G, establish educational materials, conduct 5G training, and contribute to publications such as magazines and journals.
The co-chairs of the IEEE 5G Initiative are Ashutosh Dutta and Gerhard Fettweis. In the private sector, Dutta serves as Lead Member of Technical Staff at AT&T. Fettweis serves as Senior Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute and as Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden. Both Dutta and Fettweis serve on the IEEE Communications Society’s Board of Governors and Dutta also serves as ComSoc’s Industry Outreach Director.
“5G is not only evolutionary, providing higher bandwidth and lower latency than current-generation technology; more importantly, 5G is revolutionary, in that it is expected to enable fundamentally new applications with much more stringent requirements in latency and bandwidth,” said Dutta. “5G should help solve the last-mile/last-kilometer problem and provide broadband access to the next billion users on earth at much lower cost because of its use of new spectrum and its improvements in spectral efficiency.”
