CTN Issue: April 2020

Wireless Communication and the Pandemic: The Story So Far

The World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic and almost all countries in the world have been affected by it one way or another. Many countries like Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the UK have declared full or partial lockdown and people are advised not to leave their homes unless necessary. In this difficult time, the UK announced a list of professions as key workers who will remain active and serve the society during the lockdown. This list includes doctors, pharmacists, National Health System workers, police and security forces, and telecommunication networks engineers/workers. Universities are retooling research projects to design low cost ventilators and data analytic engines to track outbreaks. Everyone is asking what they can do to help. Motivated by this, in this article we will have a look at the role of wireless telecommunications so far during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that many of these nascent efforts may not come to fruition in time to help with the current outbreak, we also ask what the potential of networks beyond current 5G will be in reacting to similar situations.

While the healthcare system, nurses and doctors are at the frontline of fighting the pandemic and protecting patients, others have to stay at home and maintain social distancing. This means that many people need to work from home using internet-based technologies. At this point, it can be argued that the load is mainly on the fixed networks which connect homes. However, this does not reduce the importance of cellular networks, but emphasizes on key design challenges of 5G and its different verticals. Figure 1 shows use of 5G technologies for considered verticals such as healthcare, education and retail during a Pandemic situation. In this lockdown situation, reliability, availability, and resilience of the cellular network are very important. To better justify the point, let us review the position of these three crucial industries/verticals during the COVID-19 lockdown first and then relevant mobile communications technologies.

5G Key Technologies and Requirements

To further investigate the potentials that mobile connectivity and 5G networks provide to different sectors during the pandemics let us review a number of key 5G technologies. Table 1 presents a summary of these key communication technologies for different considered verticals.

Pervasive Connectivity

Most houses in many developed countries have fixed fast/fiber broadband connection while in many rural areas of these countries and in developing countries, the only available connection is through cellular networks. Another type of users that fall into this category are the passengers travelling on cruise ships, where they may get stranded near a port and not be allowed to disembark [10]. In such a pandemic, providing a reliable connection to rural or remote areas or cruise ships stranded near port, enables the residents/passengers to use healthcare, government and retail services without disruption.

In order to address the ever increasing peak traffic and the aforementioned vertical applications, 5G and beyond networks can enhance existing terrestrial broadband networks by rerouting traffic through its cellular networks through advanced resource allocation and scheduling techniques. Hybrid type of wired/cellular modems (supporting Optical Fibers, Cable, xDSL, 4G, 5G) might prove a viable solution delivering broadband services for watching TV, working remotely through a VPN service, attending distance learning classes, etc. The current terrestrial network may prove inadequate in parts of cities or rural areas in handling the traffic in emergency cases such as this one. Furthermore, it can be used to provide additional capacity when needed in medical related instances.

Self-Organised and Green Networking

The number of mobile network operators (MNO) active staff/technicians during the pandemic needs to be kept as low as possible which leads to importance of network self-organisation. Self-healing helps the network to maintain the service in the covered area by the faulty base stations until MNO engineers fix the problem which may take longer than usual. Additionally, the network should independently facilitate the functions of small cell base stations (e.g., turning them off) in dense areas of business or commercial centres to reduce total energy consumption while maintaining the service in the area by macro base stations. A beyond 5G automated network will be even able to predict potential faulties and/or service degradation, and prevent them in a proactive manner.

Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC)

Ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) aims at addressing the stringent requirements of extreme and rare events in terms of their reliability and latency [11] and [12]. To satisfy these requirements, 3GPP has been using a plethora of techniques such as short packet transmission, grant-free mechanisms, leveraging spatial, frequency, and temporal diversity techniques in order to meet the 5-nine reliability and 1ms latency targets [13]. Although this might sound astonishing, applications such as high-precision robot control and autonomous vehicles cannot operate under these conditions. For example, factory automation requires a 7-nine reliability and <1ms latency [14]. Furthermore, future applications such as intelligent systems implementing real-time human-machine interactions, require 9-nine reliability with 0.1ms latency [15]. The next generation (6G) of wireless systems suggests that these stringent requirements will be addressed. Several applications that can benefit from URLLC have been described in the previous section. For example, in the Healthcare sector, haptic feedback in robot-assisted surgeries can operate using URLLC. This is extremely important as this will improve the dexterity of a surgeon while it will minimize the trauma to the patient. Similarly, in Education, URLLC can support technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and 3D holography to enhance the remote educational experience of the students who happened to have to have their classes at home due to a general lockdown of the country as a result of a pandemic.

Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC)

5G enables collecting data from millions of deployed sensors using mMTC technology. Through mMTC-based technologies many verticals including supply chain, smart agriculture, smart cities, industry 4.0 can support the societies and economies during the pandemic. Deployed sensors/actuators in cities or farms send/receive data from the centre using LTE-m/Narrow Band-IoT or LoRa and are helping further automation of essential activities [16].

Cloud/Edge/Caching

Significance of the centralised cloud services for wireless communications, internet of things and web based applications and services has now become more than ever before. With the support of edge/cloud computing and exploitation of big data analytics, such technology can yield significant gains towards the modelling of human activities and behaviour during a pandemic. Furthermore, vast amounts of data may be evaluated for content popularity estimation and strategic contents can be cached at the base stations to achieve higher users’ satisfaction and backhaul offloading [17]. This can have a profound impact for the network when employed for video content distribution.

Security, Privacy, and Trust

Operation of public and private organisations has been severely impaired not just because of the lockdowns but because their staff are not allowed to handle sensitive data remotely. 5G networks are important to provide a true and secure working-from-home experience while managing the traffic, providing high speed and low latency connectivity. 5G networks, however, present an opportunity for cyber espionage and action must be taken at a very early stage to secure vital communications against snooping. It is estimated that 5G networks will experience many more attack vectors compared to previous 4G networks [18]. This issue can become devastating where a huge number of mMTC devices will be connected to the network. To add to this, things are expected to become even less secure as current public key cryptography is vulnerable to quantum computing. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a technology based on Quantum Physics used to secure the distribution of symmetric encryption keys by allowing the exchange of a cryptographic key between two remote entities with absolute security. This key can then be used securely with conventional cryptographic algorithms. Furthermore, using Quantum Communications it is possible to synchronise high-density core 5G nodes in metropolitan networks [19].   

During pandemic large databases of citizens’ information are created which includes their health and financial information. Additionally, IoT-based sensors, cameras and smart meters are used more often than usual which create further threats to citizens’ privacy. We must highlight that the potential unintended use of this technology should be considered and companies/governments should not excessively/unnecessarily use the available technology for citizens tracking and localization. Following General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) requirements the collected data during a pandemic must be kept safe and destroyed in time. Very recently Google and Apple announced a partnership to use Bluetooth connectivity to enable “privacy preserving contact tracing” [20]. This technology would allow each mobile device to make lists of the other devices it comes into contact with through the sharing of encrypted keys. If the user of that device is diagnosed with COVID19 the device will then upload this list to the cloud and theoretically it can be used to track the contacts of this users and provide appropriate advice on isolation strategies. This technology will not be immediately available but could be used as a tool late this year as we bring economies back online and need to monitor new outbreaks closely.

Lessons Learned: Future Potential Verticals and Requirements for Beyond 5G

One of the main lessons learned from COVID-19 pandemic is that communications networks in general and wireless/cellular communications in particular are key technological elements of resilient societies. They helped us survive, remain connected, and reduced the economic damage. Aforementioned verticals and their applications can significantly benefit from improvements in the network. As beyond 5G networks will be more intelligent using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, they will satisfy requirements of many other innovative and important verticals and applications. This includes further automation (industry 4.0) and distributed autonomous decisions that allow vital production lines, consumer services and applications to continue with minimum disturbance, and smart connectivity. Agriculture sector can benefit from artificial intelligence and machine learning enabled remote condition monitoring and robotics. Tourism is one of the most affected industries by COVID-19 and beyond 5G networks can enable virtual tourism using drones and VR.

In conclusion, we believe 5G networks play a significant role in keeping the societies and communities resilient and the continuation of 5G deployment should not be delayed as a result of economic difficulties caused by COVID-19. Similarly, we believe the research and development of beyond 5G networks should be continued to support our agriculture, manufacturing and more importantly our societies.

References

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