Today’s communication systems are requiring larger and larger amounts of data, voice, video to be transmitted in a more crowded spectrum. This has implications from both a commercial wireless perspective as well as an Aerospace and Defense perspective. In order to achieve the data rate goals of 5G cellular systems, infrastructure providers will be moving to phased array antenna systems operating at higher frequencies, with significant multi-channel and wide bandwidth requirements. In this presentation, Mario Narduzzi discusses how Agilent Technologies, Inc., and now Keysight Technologies (as of Nov 1, 2014) is working with customers in the Digital, Baseband, and RF/Microwave domains to solve these next generation challenges with a variety of form factors to meet the latest test and measurement needs. This presentation will highlight the company's leverage of instrument technology across the Aerospace and Defense, Wireless, and Research markets to help enable the 5G communications evolution.

Corbett Rowell, Director of R&D at China Mobile Research Instittute will present a keynote talk that contains an overview of challenges and technologies that are a part of 5G Cellular developments from the perspective of China Mobile where 5G will increase the network capacity up to 10 Gbps while consuming a fraction of the energy of current 4G networks. First there is a high level perspective of the system and architecture issues and possible solutions. The talk then examines the practical implementation of 5G antenna, RF, and microwave technologies, focusing on the challenges and opportunities for the RF and microwave industry ecosystem.

5G not only promises more capacity but it also seeks to address limitations of current networks including latency and energy efficiency. James Kimery of National Instruments will overview some of the exciting research that has already begun and how new design approaches are being used to accelerate the time to deployment of these new technologies and capabilities.

Although in an early stage of discussion and in the absence of an accurate 5G definition, some major trends can be identified already today. To cope with the increasing amount of data traffic a number of solutions are discussed. These include new frequency ranges, higher bandwidth and better usage of the spectrum, i.e. more sophisticated transmission schemes and antenna technology. Taking into account that high frequencies impact the achievable range significantly, a tight integration with existing cellular technologies like LTE/LTE-Advanced will likely be required. The T&M industry needs to be a forerunner enabling the development and test of any new technology. This presentation Josef Wolf of Rohde & Schwarz highlights the T&M impact from some of the technology components foreseeable today.