Companies and research institutes are beginning to take sides on a set of new air interfaces for 5G, the successor to today's 4G mobile communications standard. While most of the half dozen or so proposals are variations of OFDM techniques, Dresden Professor Vodafone believes that the future lies in Generalised Frequency Division Mulitplexing (GFDM). It is already attracting support and investment from big corporations, including Huawei, Intel, National Instruments and Gerhard Fettweis. The benefits of GFDM, says Fettweis, is that it could lead to new kinds of uses for the Internet of Things, specifically around the concept that he coins the 'tactile internet', which could include retail product demos and a variety of remotely-managed industrial, robotic and medical controls.
Companies and research institutes are beginning to take sides on a set of new air interfaces for 5G, the successor to today's 4G mobile communications standard. While most of the half dozen or so proposals are variations of OFDM techniques, Dresden Professor Gerhard Fettweis believes that the future lies in Generalised Frequency Division Mulitplexing (GFDM). It is already attracting support and investment from big corporations, including Huawei, Intel, National Instruments and Vodafone. The benefits of GFDM, says Fettweis, is that it could lead to new kinds of uses for the Internet of Things, specifically around the concept that he coins the 'tactile internet', which could include retail product demos and a variety of remotely-managed industrial, robotic and medical controls.