The advent of Active Antenna Systems has provided new ways and features for increasing the capacity of mobile networks in order to cope with the ever increasing traffic demand. One such feature is the vertical sectorisation (VS) technique where a cell is divided into an inner and an outer sector by using a second downtilted beam from one antenna. The two sectors use the same spectrum resources but share the electrical power available. The limitation in available power per sector, raises the question whether there is gain in using VS, and if so, how much and under which circumstances. This paper presents some new numerical results on the performance gains of VS in a realistic LTE network environment, especially for the case of independent activation of the feature across cells in the network. We also present a framework for the design of a SON controller enabling the smart (de)activation of the feature based on the estimated/observed traffic distribution. The controller design follows two steps: first the functional form of the controller is derived based on analytical modelling, and then this functional form is calibrated using realistic measurements in a statistical learning fashion.

As 5G networks are being deployed across the world, more and more vertical industries are discovering the benefits of 5G connectivity and the novel business and innovation models that it has to offer. The Transport & Logistics (T&L) industry is expected to be one of the key adopters of 5G technology, where the 5G enterprise market for T&L is estimated to reach $2.9 trillion (€2.7 trillion) by 2026 and grow at a CAGR of 47.5% [1]. However, the adoption and penetration of 5G-based solutions in T&L may be hindered by the knowledge/expertise gap between the vertical industry, the telecommunication experts and the application developers. 5G based Network Applications (NetApps) represent a key enabler for the adoption of 5G solutions, as they can abstract the complexity of the underlying 5G infrastructure for T&L application developers, and significantly reduce the service creation and deployment times, as well as optimize the utilization of 5G resources. The European Innovation Action project VITAL-5G has the vision to advance the offered T&L services by showcasing the benefits of 5G-based NetApps via real-life trials over state of the art vertical (T&L) facilities (warehouse, hubs, ports) and advanced European 5Gtestbeds. To support both internal and 3 rd -party experimentation, VITAL-5G will create an elaborate experimentation service portal and online repository which will facilitate the creation, deployment, monitoring and (re)configuration of NetApps in the vertical environment.

Just before the commercial roll-out of European 5G networks, 5G trials in realistic environments have been recently initiated all around Europe, as part of the Phase 3 projects of 5GPPP H2020 program [1]. The goal is to showcase 5G's capabilities and to convince stakeholders about its valueadding business potential. The approach is to offer advanced 5G connectivity to real vertical industries and showcase how it enables them to overcome existing 4G network limitation and other long-standing issues. The 5G EVE H2020 5GPPP project [2] offers cutting-edge 5G end-to-end facilities (in 4 countries) to diversified vertical industry experimenters. The objective is to understand the needs of prominent industries across Europe and to offer tailor-made 5G experience to each and every one of them. This paper contributes to the understanding of vertical services' needs, by offering a thorough and concise vertical requirements analysis methodology, including an examination of the 4G limitations. It also provides real-life values for the targeted KPIs of 3 vertical sectors namely Smart Industry (4.0), Smart Cities / Health and Smart Energy, while assisting market roll-out by prioritizing their connectivity needs.

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Abstract-Vertical Sectorisation (VS) is a feature that exploits the capabilities of Active Antenna Systems (AAS) to improve service performance and network capacity, by splitting a single cell into an inner and outer sector. The attained gains primarily depend on the suitable and timely (de)activation of VS in response to the observed/estimated traffic distribution within the cell, while further gains can be achieved by properly adjusting VS parameters such as the transmit power distribution. Considering a realistic LTE (Long Term Evolution) network environment, in this paper a SON (Self Organizing Network) algorithm is proposed and evaluated, which dynamically (de)activates the VS feature and sets the transmit power split. The results show that the (de)activation of VS through a suitably tuned SON algorithm achieves significant throughput gains, while the dynamic adaptation of the transmit power distribution is mostly beneficial when operating in interference-limited environments.

The fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks introduced massive machine-type communications (mMTC) to cope with the growing demand of massive Internet of things (IoT) applications. However, the heterogeneous characteristics of massive IoT and diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements may lead to severe interference that could degrade the expected QoS of the cellular ecosystem.Therefore, this paper studies the impact of interference caused by mMTC connections. We theoretically model the inter-cell interference (ICI) minimization problem for the existing orthogonal multiple access (OMA) technique and propose its corresponding solution. Furthermore, we jointly solve the ICI and the co-channel interference minimization problem for the IoT users when the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique is used. For the proposed OMA and NOMA schemes, we design a cooperative scheduler to reduce the impact of such interference. The results show that our proposed schemes provide up to 58%, 75%, and 100% more improvements in terms of user's data rates, energy consumption, and connection density, respectively