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

Cellular networks are usually modeled by placing the base stations on a grid, with mobile users either randomly scattered or placed deterministically. These models have been used extensively but suffer from being both highly idealized and not very tractable, so complex system-level simulations are used to evaluate coverage/outage probability and rate. More tractable models have long been desirable. We develop new general models for the multi-cell signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) using stochastic geometry. Under very general assumptions, the resulting expressions for the downlink SINR CCDF (equivalent to the coverage probability) involve quickly computable integrals, and in some practical special cases can be simplified to common integrals (e.g., the Q-function) or even to simple closed-form expressions. We also derive the mean rate, and then the coverage gain (and mean rate loss) from static frequency reuse. We compare our coverage predictions to the grid model and an actual base station deployment, and observe that the proposed model is pessimistic (a lower bound on coverage) whereas the grid model is optimistic, and that both are about equally accurate. In addition to being more tractable, the proposed model may better capture the increasingly opportunistic and dense placement of base stations in future networks.

A Tractable Approach to Coverage and Rate in Cellular Networks

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective

Multiple-antenna wireless communication links promise very high data rates with low error probabilities, especially when the wireless channel response is known at the receiver. In practice, knowledge of the channel is often obtained by sending known training symbols to the receiver. We show how training affects the capacity of a fading channel-too little training and the channel is improperly learned, too much training and there is no time left for data transmission before the channel changes. We compute a lower bound on the capacity of a channel that is learned by training, and maximize the bound as a function of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), fading coherence time, and number of transmitter antennas. When the training and data powers are allowed to vary, we show that the optimal number of training symbols is equal to the number of transmit antennas-this number is also the smallest training interval length that guarantees meaningful estimates of the channel matrix. When the training and data powers are instead required to be equal, the optimal number of symbols may be larger than the number of antennas. We show that training-based schemes can be optimal at high SNR, but suboptimal at low SNR.

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How much training is needed in multiple-antenna wireless links?

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

This paper presents an overview of the theory and currently known techniques for multi-cell MIMO (multiple input multiple output) cooperation in wireless networks. In dense networks where interference emerges as the key capacity-limiting factor, multi-cell cooperation can dramatically improve the system performance. Remarkably, such techniques literally exploit inter-cell interference by allowing the user data to be jointly processed by several interfering base stations, thus mimicking the benefits of a large virtual MIMO array. Multi-cell MIMO cooperation concepts are examined from different perspectives, including an examination of the fundamental information-theoretic limits, a review of the coding and signal processing algorithmic developments, and, going beyond that, consideration of very practical issues related to scalability and system-level integration. A few promising and quite fundamental research avenues are also suggested.

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Multi-Cell MIMO Cooperative Networks: A New Look at Interference

Reliable transmission over a discrete-time memoryless channel with a decoding metric that is not necessarily matched to the channel (mismatched decoding) is considered. It is assumed that the encoder knows both the true channel and the decoding metric. The lower bound on the highest achievable rate found by Csiszar and Korner (1981) and by Hui (1983) for DMC's, hereafter denoted C/sub LM/, is shown to bear some interesting information-theoretic meanings. The bound C/sub LM/ turns out to be the highest achievable rate in the random coding sense, namely, the random coding capacity for mismatched decoding. It is also demonstrated that the /spl epsiv/-capacity associated with mismatched decoding cannot exceed C/sub LM/. New bounds and some properties of C/sub LM/ are established and used to find relations to the generalized mutual information and to the generalized cutoff rate. The expression for C/sub LM/ is extended to a certain class of memoryless channels with continuous input and output alphabets, and is used to calculate C/sub LM/ explicitly for several examples of theoretical and practical interest. Finally, it is demonstrated that in contrast to the classical matched decoding case, here, under the mismatched decoding regime, the highest achievable rate depends on whether the performance criterion is the bit error rate or the message error probability and whether the coding strategy is deterministic or randomized. >

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On information rates for mismatched decoders

A cellular system where macrocells are overlaid with femtocells is studied. Each femtocell is served by a home base station (HBS) that is connected to the macrocell base station (BS) via an unreliable network access link, such as DSL followed by the Internet. A scenario with a single macrocell and a single femtocell is considered first, and is then extended to include multiple macrocells and femtocells, both with standard single-cell processing and with multicell processing (or network MIMO). Two main issues are addressed for the uplink channel: (i) Interference management between femto and macrocells; (ii) Robustness to uncertainties on the quality of the femtocell (HBSto-BS) access link. The problem is formulated in information-theoretic terms, and inner and outer bounds are derived to achievable per-cell sum-rates for outdoor and home users. Expected sum-rates with respect to the distribution of the femtocells access link states are studied as well. Overall, the analysis lends evidence to the performance advantages of sophisticated interference management techniques, based on joint decoding and relaying, and of robust coding strategies via the broadcast coding approach (i.e., unequal error protection).

S Shamai Shitz

Papers

Multi-Cell MIMO Cooperative Networks: A New Look at Interference

On information rates for mismatched decoders

Robust Transmission and Interference Management For Femtocells with Unreliable Network Access