The
programmability, flexibility and high levels of automation of 5G operations
will reduce costs (e.g., OPEX) and create new service paradigms which might be
even beyond our imagination. Some examples concern the applications of the
Internet of Things, Tactile Internet, advanced Robotics, Immersive
Communications and, in general, the X-as-a-Service paradigm.
Let
us consider some examples. Cloud Robotics and 5G-controlled robotics will have
huge impacts in several sectors, such as industrial and agricultural
automation, in smart cities and in many domestic applications. In agriculture,
autonomous machines will be used for tasks like crop inspection, the targeted
use of water and pesticides, and for other actions and monitoring activities
that will assist farmers, as well as in data gathering, exchange and processing
for process optimization. Interestingly, Cloud Robotics and 5G APIs can be
opened to end-users and third-parties to develop, program and provide any type
of related service or application for pursuing specific tasks. In industry,
this will pave the way to process automation, data exchange and robotics
manufacturing technologies (e.g., Industry 4.0). It is likely that we will soon
see robotic applications in the domestic environment: it is estimated that by
2050-2060 one third of European people will be over 65. The cost of the
combined pension and health care system could be close to 29% of the European
GDP. Remotely controlled and operated robots will enable remote medical/supportive
care and open up a new world of domestic applications which may also be
incorporated by the entire population (e.g. cleaning, cooking, playing,
communicating, etc.).
5G
will have a big impact also on the automotive and transportation markets.
Nevertheless there are still open issues. In fact, even if significant
progresses have been made in developing self-driving/autonomous machines,
equipped with sensors, actuators and ICT capabilities, the achievement of very
low reaction times still represent an open challenge. As a matter of fact, the
autonomous driving in real traffic is a very challenging problem: reaction time
in units of milliseconds, or even less, are needed for safety reasons to avoid
sudden and unpredictable obstacles. This means that a considerable amount of
computing and storage power must be always available through ultra-low latency
links. Today, the amount of computing and storage power that can be equipped
locally in a machine/vehicle is not enough (for several reasons, e.g., space,
dissipation limits, costs restraints, etc.) to cope with these requirements.
Huge amounts of data needs to be stored and accessed and the AI methods have to
be executed very quickly to exploit such levels of reactive autonomy. An
ultra-low latency 5G network will allow exploiting the best balance of
resources in the Cloud and Edge Computing systems, thus offering trade-offs
between a local vs global cognition execution, essential to minimize reaction
times.
In
a similar direction, images/video real-time processing, for example for
recognizing forms, faces or even emotions in photos or live-streamed video,
represents another challenging case study or AI in 5G infrastructures. In fact,
this could be radically improved from the distributed execution of deep
learning solutions in a 5G infrastructure capable of providing ultra-low
latency connectivity links. Also in this
case, performances will be improved by the flexibility of 5G in dynamically
allocating/moving either huge data sets and software tasks/service where/when
it is more effective to have them.
Another
example is Immersive Communications, which refers to a paradigm going beyond
the “commoditization” of current communication means (e.g., voice, messaging,
social media, etc.). Immersive Communications will be enabled by new advanced
technologies of social communication interactions, for example through
artificially intelligent avatars, cognitive robot-human interfaces, etc.
Eventually, the term X-as-a-Service will refer to the possibility of providing
(anytime and anywhere) wider and wider sets of 5G services by means of anything
from machines to smart things, from robots to toys, etc. If today we are
already linking our minds with laptops, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices,
and avatars, in the future we will see enhanced forms of interactions between
humans, intelligent machines and software processes.
Current
socio-economic drivers and ICT trends are already bringing to a convergence
Computer Science, Telecommunications and AI.
In
this profound transformation, mathematics will be the language, computation
will be about running that language (coded in software), storage will be about
saving this encoded information, and, eventually, the network will be creating
relationships – at almost zero latency -- between these sets of functions. This
trend will also see the rise of the so-called Networked AI with
humans-in-the-loop. Today there are already some examples, such as
analyst-in-the-loop security systems, which combine human experts’ intuition
with machine learning capable of predicting infrastructure cyber-attacks.
Although
security and privacy are out of the scope of this work (focusing on 5G enabling
capabilities), these two strategic areas deserve some further considerations.
On one side 5G could provide the means for improving security, for example as
information will be available everywhere and the context needed to detect
anomalous behavior will be more easily provided; nevertheless on the other
side, enabling technologies such as SDN and NFV have the potential to create
situations where all primary personal data and information is held and
controlled at a global level, even outside the national jurisdiction of
individual citizens. It has been mentioned, as an example, the real-time
processing of several thousands of images per second and live-streamed video:
this will have wide-ranging, but also controversial applications: from
predicting crimes, terrorist acts and social upheaval to law enforcement and
psychological analysis. Eventually, in the long term, this might transform
everything from policing to the way people interact every day with banks,
stores, and transportation services: this will have huge security and privacy
implications.
Reasonably
privacy and security concerns should be considered by-design, with systemic solutions capable of operating at
different levels in future 5G infrastructures: for example, such design will
need to consider issues such as automated mutual authentication, isolation,
data access and management of multiple virtual network slices coexisting onto
the same 5G infrastructure.
