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5G Emerging Technologies
5G Emerging Technologies
Advancements in cellular technologies over the past three A. RAN Centralization and Virtualization
to four decades have completely revolutionized communi- Recently machine type communications have seen tremen-
cation across the globe. Starting from purely analog first dous advancements. The number of devices in IoT and WSNs
generation (1G) voice only services back in eighties to the are rising exponentially which indicate that the data rates
completely digital fourth generation (4G) faster data services would also rise to phenomenal figures. As the current available
have changed the lives of individuals upside down. Services spectrum is already congested and can accommodate such
such as High Definition (HD) video streaming and confer- higher data rates. Thus, the communication engineers are now
encing, ever fast web browsing, ever growing social media focusing on a higher-end spectrum where a huge amount
connectivity, machine to machine communication and much of unused bandwidth lies. However, the higher frequencies
more are common stories these days. However, things now in require small coverage areas as they don’t travel far and fad
telecom sector are changing. Demands from next generation out quickly. Which in turn implies a massive infrastructure of
cellular networks are not just a slight increase in data rate base station transmitters and corresponding processing units
and a few variations in network architecture but much more. to be deployed. This would cause heavy cost burden thus
Alongside enhanced mobile broadband enabling current trends making it extremely inefficient to deploy. This makes the
such as cloud computing and high-speed connectivity the ul- current deployed procedures to be replaced with newer ones.
trareliable low latency communications such as tactile internet, Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) [2] is a centralized
vehicle to anything (V2X) and e-medicine are of significant RAN which significantly overcomes these limitations. C-RAN
importance. The powerful idea of interconnecting various architecture via utilizing the concept of network virtualization
connectable device commonly called Internet of Things (IoT) could potentially handle any number of base station transmit-
has recently emerged and gained enormous popularity. The ters as required by the network. In C-RAN via centralized
wireless sensor networks are expanding on everyday basis pool the channel processing is virtualized and is easily shared
turning homes and cities to smart homes and smart cities. amongst operators. Using the concept of centralization, the
Demands like the ones mentioned above and much more [1] data traffic could be handled in a more dynamic way and the
have long been predicted and that’s why the upcoming fifth resources could be efficiently brought into use. Furthermore,
generation (5G) of cellular communication have claimed to power consumption would also go down while adopting the
provide promising solutions to all of them. 5G through its prescribed architecture. Another key parameter in C-RAN
state of the art technologies have made it possible to meet the is virtualization. Virtualization helps in logically isolating
challenges in its way. The purpose of this paper is to survey resources where as the physical resources are shared in a
the underlying technologies in 5G and provide an insight to dynamically scalable environment. Storage, computing and
how they will fulfill the requirements. Beginning with RAN network are some of the resources in this regard which makes
Centralization and Virtualization the discussion then proceeds virtualization critical in C-RAN architecture. In virtualization
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B. Massive MIMO
MIMO stands for Multiple Input Multiple Output. It’s a con-
cept which utilizes spatial diversity and spatial multiplexing
in a communication system via deploying multiple transmitter
and receiver antennas [3]. Any wireless channel imposes sev- Fig. 4. Millimeter Wave Communication advantages
eral challenges to communication systems. One of the major
challenges is that of multipaths. When a transmitter transmits thus engineers have now turned their attention towards other
a signal, the receiver doesn’t just receive a single copy of the regions of the spectrum and have come up with the mmWaves
signal but multiple copies traveling through different paths. to combat the issue [4]. The mmWave region has never been
Due to the difference in path lengths the multiple received previously used for any sort of communication and thus has
copies differ in phase and amplitude. The copies add up an enormous amount of free bandwidth available which is
giving rise to a phenomenon called Inter-Symbol-Interference expected to enhance the data rates even up to the limits of
(ISI) which distorts the signal shape. MIMO systems could optical fiber. However, mmWaves have their own limitations
turn this problem into an advantage via transmitting the same and must be dealt while designing systems for communication
signal through different antennas. The receiver receiving the in this region. One of the major limitations with mmWaves is
same signal separate copies through different antennas would that they don’t travel far as compare to other waves and fads
then have a diverse choice to make the decision and hence out quickly while penetrating through obstacles. The reason is
would improve the detection accuracy. Another advantage because as the frequency of the radio waves increases they
of MIMO system is of spatial multiplexing where multiple tend to behave more like light and thus greatly attenuates
antennas could be fed with different data streams on the as they penetrate through solid objects. Moreover factors
same radio channel hence increasing data rate. Initially MIMO like humidity, rain conditions etc also greatly affects their
systems were just having 2 by 2, 4 by 4 or maximum of not propagation. Thus, now the communication systems won’t
more than 10 antennas. However, later on in Massive MIMO have the luxury to communicate over long distances and would
systems which have gained popularity recently the antenna require to operate in smaller regions. This would result in an
numbers could be increased to hundreds which dramatically enormous increase in the base station transmitters since now
enhances the channel capacity. In 5G systems the concept of every small region would need to have a base station. However,
Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) is introduced where the base the data rates would experience an explosive increase and
station deploys as many antennas as the number of users thus would more come closer to the speed of optical fiber.
allocating one antenna per user on the same radio link. This
would not just improve the cell capacity but would also make
D. Ultra-Dense Networks (UDNs)
up for reducing the power consumption of the cell.
As described earlier about the exponential growing demand
of data rate especially with the introduction of IoT and ma-
C. Millimeter Wave Communication chine to machine communication resulting in data explosion.
The mmWaves are referred to the region between 30 to In order to meet the challenge of such fast-growing data rate
100 GHz (between infrared and microwave) in the spectrum. 5G amongst other core techniques has heavily focused on
Since the ever-increasing demand for capacity has caused a network densification [5]. Network densification via deploying
severe congestion in the existing used spectrum (centimeter small powered cells (pico and femtocells) and reusing the same
waves) and the spectrum is now running out of capacity frequency resources offer promising solutions in combating
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