The evolution towards 5G mobile networks will be characterized by an increasing number of wireless devices, an increasing device and service complexity, and the requirement to access mobile services ubiquitously. Two key enablers will allow for realizing the vision of 5G: very dense deployments and centralized processing. This article discusses the challenges and requirements on the design of 5G mobile networks based upon these two key enablers. It discusses how cloud technologies and a flexible functionality assignment in radio access networks enable network densification and centralized operation of the radio access network over heterogeneous backhaul networks. The article describes the fundamental concepts, shows how to evolve the 3GPP LTE architecture, and outlines the expected benefits.

Software Defined Networking (SDN), characterized by a clear separation of the control and data planes, is being adopted as a novel paradigm for wired networking. With SDN, network operators can run their infrastructure more efficiently, supporting a faster deployment of new services while enabling key features such as virtualization. In this article, we adopt an SDN-like approach applied to wireless mobile networks that will not only benefit from the same features as in the wired case, but also will leverage on the distinct features of mobile deployments to push improvements even further. We illustrate with a number of representative use cases the benefits from the adoption of the proposed architecture, which is detailed in terms of modules, interfaces and high-level signaling. We also review the ongoing standardization efforts, and discuss the potential advantages, weaknesses and the need for a coordinated approach.

The ever-increasing demand of mobile internet traffic is pushing operators to look for solutions to increase the available bandwidth per user and per unit of area. At the same time, they need to reduce the load in the core network at a reasonable cost in their future 5G deployments. Today's trend points to the deployment of extremely dense networks in order to provide ubiquitous connectivity at high data rates. However, this is hard to couple with the current mobile networks' architecture, which is heavily centralized, posing difficult challenges when coping with the foreseen explosion of mobile data. Additionally, future 5G networks will exhibit disparate types of services, posing different connectivity requirements. Distributed Mobility Management is emerging as a valid framework to design future mobile network architectures, taking into account the requirements for large traffic in the core and the rise of the extremely dense wireless access networks. In this article, we discuss the adoption of a Distributed Mobility Management approach for mobile networks, and analyze the operation of the main existing solutions proposed so far, including a first practical evaluation based on experiments with real Linux-based prototype implementations.

No abstract

No abstract