What will 5G be? What it will not be is an incremental advance on 4G. The previous four generations of cellular technology have each been a major paradigm shift that has broken backward compatibility. Indeed, 5G will need to be a paradigm shift that includes very high carrier frequencies with massive bandwidths, extreme base station and device densities, and unprecedented numbers of antennas. However, unlike the previous four generations, it will also be highly integrative: tying any new 5G air interface and spectrum together with LTE and WiFi to provide universal high-rate coverage and a seamless user experience. To support this, the core network will also have to reach unprecedented levels of flexibility and intelligence, spectrum regulation will need to be rethought and improved, and energy and cost efficiencies will become even more critical considerations. This paper discusses all of these topics, identifying key challenges for future research and preliminary 5G standardization activities, while providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature, and in particular of the papers appearing in this special issue.

What Will 5G Be

In the near future, i.e., beyond 4G, some of the prime objectives or demands that need to be addressed are increased capacity, improved data rate, decreased latency, and better quality of service. To meet these demands, drastic improvements need to be made in cellular network architecture. This paper presents the results of a detailed survey on the fifth generation (5G) cellular network architecture and some of the key emerging technologies that are helpful in improving the architecture and meeting the demands of users. In this detailed survey, the prime focus is on the 5G cellular network architecture, massive multiple input multiple output technology, and device-to-device communication (D2D). Along with this, some of the emerging technologies that are addressed in this paper include interference management, spectrum sharing with cognitive radio, ultra-dense networks, multi-radio access technology association, full duplex radios, millimeter wave solutions for 5G cellular networks, and cloud technologies for 5G radio access networks and software defined networks. In this paper, a general probable 5G cellular network architecture is proposed, which shows that D2D, small cell access points, network cloud, and the Internet of Things can be a part of 5G cellular network architecture. A detailed survey is included regarding current research projects being conducted in different countries by research groups and institutions that are working on 5G technologies.

A Survey of 5G Network: Architecture and Emerging Technologies

Formally we have arrived at the middle of the book. So you may need a pause for recovering, a pause which we want to fill up by some fixed point theorems supplementing those which you already met or which you will meet in later chapters. The first group of results centres around Banach’s fixed point theorem. The latter is certainly a nice result since it contains only one simple condition on the map F, since it is so easy to prove and since it nevertheless allows a variety of applications. Therefore it is not astonishing that many mathematicians have been attracted by the question to which extent the conditions on F and the space Ω can be changed so that one still gets the existence of a unique or of at least one fixed point. The number of results produced this way is still finite, but of a statistical magnitude, suggesting at a first glance that only a random sample can be covered by a chapter or even a book of the present size. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) most of the modifications have not found applications up to now, so that there is no reason to write a cookery book about conditions but to write at least a short outline of some ideas indicating that this field can be as interesting as other chapters. A systematic account of more recent ideas and examples in fixed point theory should however be written by one of the true experts. Strange as it is, such a book does not seem to exist though so many people are puzzling out so many results.

Fixed Point Theory

Imagine a world with more base stations than cell phones: this is where cellular technology is headed in 10-20 years. This mega-trend requires many fundamental differences in visualizing, modeling, analyzing, simulating, and designing cellular networks vs. the current textbook approach. In this article, the most important shifts are distilled down to seven key factors, with the implications described and new models and techniques proposed for some, while others are ripe areas for future exploration.

Seven ways that HetNets are a cellular paradigm shift

We provide a comprehensive overview of mathematical models and analytical techniques for millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular systems. The two fundamental physical differences from conventional sub-6-GHz cellular systems are: 1) vulnerability to blocking and 2) the need for significant directionality at the transmitter and/or receiver, which is achieved through the use of large antenna arrays of small individual elements. We overview and compare models for both of these factors, and present a baseline analytical approach based on stochastic geometry that allows the computation of the statistical distributions of the downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and also the per link data rate, which depends on the SINR as well as the average load. There are many implications of the models and analysis: 1) mmWave systems are significantly more noise-limited than at sub-6 GHz for most parameter configurations; 2) initial access is much more difficult in mmWave; 3) self-backhauling is more viable than in sub-6-GHz systems, which makes ultra-dense deployments more viable, but this leads to increasingly interference-limited behavior; and 4) in sharp contrast to sub-6-GHz systems cellular operators can mutually benefit by sharing their spectrum licenses despite the uncontrolled interference that results from doing so. We conclude by outlining several important extensions of the baseline model, many of which are promising avenues for future research.

Modeling and Analyzing Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems

For small cell technology to significantly increase the capacity of tower-based cellular networks, mobile users will need to be actively pushed onto the more lightly loaded tiers (corresponding to, e.g., pico and femtocells), even if they offer a lower instantaneous SINR than the macrocell base station (BS). Optimizing a function of the long-term rate for each user requires (in general) a massive utility maximization problem over all the SINRs and BS loads. On the other hand, an actual implementation will likely resort to a simple biasing approach where a BS in tier j is treated as having its SINR multiplied by a factor Aj ≥ 1, which makes it appear more attractive than the heavily-loaded macrocell. This paper bridges the gap between these approaches through several physical relaxations of the network-wide association problem, whose solution is NP hard. We provide a low-complexity distributed algorithm that converges to a near-optimal solution with a theoretical performance guarantee, and we observe that simple per-tier biasing loses surprisingly little, if the bias values Aj are chosen carefully. Numerical results show a large (3.5x) throughput gain for cell-edge users and a 2x rate gain for median users relative to a maximizing received power association.

User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

For small cell technology to significantly increase the capacity of tower-based cellular networks, mobile users will need to be actively pushed onto the more lightly loaded tiers (corresponding to, e.g., pico and femtocells), even if they offer a lower instantaneous SINR than the macrocell base station (BS). Optimizing a function of the long-term rates for each user requires (in general) a massive utility maximization problem over all the SINRs and BS loads. On the other hand, an actual implementation will likely resort to a simple biasing approach where a BS in tier j is treated as having its SINR multiplied by a factor A_j>=1, which makes it appear more attractive than the heavily-loaded macrocell. This paper bridges the gap between these approaches through several physical relaxations of the network-wide optimal association problem, whose solution is NP hard. We provide a low-complexity distributed algorithm that converges to a near-optimal solution with a theoretical performance guarantee, and we observe that simple per-tier biasing loses surprisingly little, if the bias values A_j are chosen carefully. Numerical results show a large (3.5x) throughput gain for cell-edge users and a 2x rate gain for median users relative to a max received power association.

An embodiment method for power control in a multi-hop communications system includes transmitting a power usage pattern for each relay node in a subset of relay nodes served by a communications controller, where the power usage pattern specifies transmit power levels for the relay node while the relay node is operating in a power control mode. The method also includes receiving channel measurements of access links between the relay nodes in the subset of relay nodes and subscriber equipment served by the relay nodes, determining backhaul link transmit power levels and access link transmit power levels based on the channel measurements of access links and channel measurements of backhaul links between the communications controller and the relay nodes, and transmitting the access link power levels to the subset of relay nodes.

System and method for distributed power control in a communications system

Device-to-device ( $ \sf {D2D}$ ) communication is a promising approach to optimize the utilization of air interface resources in 5G networks, since it allows decentralized opportunistic short-range communication. For $ \sf {D2D}$ to be useful, mobile nodes must possess content that other mobiles want. Thus, intelligent caching techniques are essential for $ \sf {D2D}$ . In this paper, we use results from stochastic geometry to derive the probability of successful content delivery in the presence of interference and noise. We employ a general transmission strategy, where multiple files are cached at the users and different files can be transmitted simultaneously throughout the network. We then formulate an optimization problem, and find the caching distribution that maximizes the density of successful receptions (DSR) under a simple transmission strategy, where a single file is transmitted at a time throughout the network. We model file requests by a Zipf distribution with exponent $\gamma _{r}$ , which results in an optimal caching distribution that is also a Zipf distribution with exponent $\gamma _{c}$ , which is related to $\gamma _{r}$ through a simple expression involving the path loss exponent. We solve the optimal content placement problem for more general demand profiles under Rayleigh, Ricean, and Nakagami small-scale fading distributions. Our results suggest that it is required to flatten the request distribution to optimize the caching performance. We also develop strategies to optimize content caching for the more general case with multiple files, and bound the DSR for that scenario.

Optimizing Content Caching to Maximize the Density of Successful Receptions in Device-to-Device Networking

Cellular network performance can significantly benefit from direct device-to-device (D2D) communication, but interference from cochannel D2D communication limits the performance gain. In hybrid networks consisting of D2D and cellular links, finding the optimal interference management is challenging. In particular, we show that the problem of maximizing network throughput while guaranteeing predefined service levels to cellular users is non-convex and hence intractable. Instead, we adopt a distributed approach that is computationally extremely efficient, and requires minimal coordination, communication and cooperation among the nodes. The key algorithmic idea is a signaling mechanism that can be seen as a fictional pricing mechanism, that the base stations optimize and transmit to the D2D users, who then play a best response (i.e., selfishly) to this signal. Numerical results show that our algorithms converge quickly, have low overhead, and achieve a significant throughput gain, while maintaining the quality of cellular links at a predefined service level.

Mazin Al-Shalash

Papers

User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

System and method for distributed power control in a communications system

Optimizing Content Caching to Maximize the Density of Successful Receptions in Device-to-Device Networking

Distributed resource allocation in device-to-device enhanced cellular networks