Abstract
Growing client population, ever-increasing service demand, and complexity of services are the driving factors for the mobile operators for a paradigm shift in their core technology and radio access networks. 5G mobile network is the result of this paradigm shift and currently under deployment in many developed countries such as United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, and China—to name a few. However, most of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have very recently been implemented 4G mobile networks for which the overall role out phase is still not complete. In this paper, we investigate how feasible it is for LDCs to emphasize on a possible deployment of 5G networks at the moment. At first, we take a holistic approach to show the major technical challenges LDCs are likely to face while deploying the 5G mobile networks. Then we argue that various security aspects of 5G networks are an ongoing issue and LDCs are not technologically competent to handle many security glitches of 5G networks. At the same time, we show that most of the use cases of 5G networks are not applicable in the context of many LDCs (at least at the present time). Finally, this paper concludes that the start of the 5G network deployment in LDCs would take much longer time than expected.
Highlights
We present a short survey on the feasibility of 5G network deployment in the current context of Least Developed Countries (LDCs)
Some of the security challenges are DoS/distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, MITM attacks, exploiting existing loopholes in open-source software—all inherited from Software Defined Networking (SDN)
The support of massive Internet of Things (IoT) opens up major security threats like spoofing attacks, replay attacks, system capturing attacks, sniffing and tampering attacks, etc for which defense mechanisms are extremely difficult to scale due to massiveness in a number of devices
Summary
Some salient features of 5G networks are high capacity, faster response time with near-zero latency (4 - 5 ms), high speed up to 10 Gbps, support of wide range of applications, accommodating 100 times more devices, more software options to upgrade and ubiquitous connectivity, etc. Such handful features do not come without price. 5G deployment is a daunting task—even more challenging for Least Developed Countries (LDCs). This paper is all about a feasibility study of possible 5G mobile network deployment in LDCs. At first, we provide a brief description of new 5G technology. We conclude that beginning of 5G deployment in LDCs will require much longer time than expected
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
