PISCATAWAY, N.J.-- IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization advancing technology for humanity, today announced the launch of the IEEE 5G Initiative 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. Professionals interested in volunteering are invited to visit the Contribute page of the IEEE 5G web portal and indicate their areas of interest. The IEEE 5G initiative is all inclusive and is turning its attention to the needs of all parts of the world.

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.”

“As the entry point to decades of immeasurable opportunities for innovation, 5G will enable Massive Servicing and The Tactile Internet that will be faster than the speed of light,” said Fettweis. “The IEEE 5G Initiative is convening the vast breadth of IEEE resources in its members around the globe and new participants to realize targets like one terabyte per second WiFi and 10 Gigabit per second cellular by 2025; one millisecond latency rate; and 25 bytes every 100 seconds for 10 years from a AAA battery.”

Interested professionals may also join the IEEE 5G Technical Community. Participants in 5G Technical Community can learn and collaborate on the 5G Initiative that has applications in many industries and markets. Members of the community have access to extensive resources including publications, videos, articles, interviews, webinars, newsletters, workshops, and conferences.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE)