Indian Institution of Technology (IIT) Patna will hold the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) summit from March 29 to 31.

The summit will discuss the future of cellphone telephony, among them the fifth generation (5G) mobile telephony, which entails faster voice and data exchange among cellphone users, as also between service providers and customers.

The conference will be held in Asia for the first time. Earlier, the summits have been held at Princeton University (May 2015), Toronto and Santa Clara (November 2015).

IIT-Patna director Pushpak Bhattacharya told The Telegraph: "The international summit will open doors for researchers, students and people from industries working in the field of cellphone technology to know more about 5G."

The summit will provide a platform to industry leaders, innovators and researchers from the industry and academic community to collaborate and exchange ideas with focus on the fifth generation mobile networks (5G).

For example, 2G provided a platform that made voice and data transfer faster among users, but sending video files, which are larger in size used to be very slow.

In the case of 3G, the usage became faster and the level enhanced further with the introduction of 4G. The buffering time decreases with the increase in surfing speed.

As against 4G that allows one to surf the internet at a maximum speed of 1GB per second, one can surf the same with a maximum speed of 10GB per second in 5G. One gigabyte equals to 1,000,000,000 bits. A bit (short for binary digit) is the smallest unit of data.

Also, 5G will have ultra-low latency, which would reduce to one millisecond from the existing 50 milliseconds in the case of 4G. Latency refers to the time it takes for one device to send data to another device.

Elaborating about the summit, Pritam Kumar, an associate professor at IIT-Patna and coordinator of the summit, said: "We have invited students from across the country to take part in the summit. Students from different IITs, NITs and even private engineering colleges are going to participate."

Senior representatives from the telecom sector are also expected to attend it. According to IIT-Patna sources, Samsung, Nokia, Tectonics Technologies and Airtel have confirmed their participation. Senior representatives from the US-based National Instruments and Keysight will take part in the summit. Both the companies are exploring new technologies required to implement 5G.

IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society promoting the development of electro-technology and allied sciences.