The Dual Connectivity (DC) technology has gained a lot of momentum in the LTE Release 12 as a means to enhance the per-user throughput and provide mobility robustness. Some studies in the literature have discussed a coupling between the LTE and the air interface of the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) in a DC scenario. That integration may provide some benefits to meet the high throughput demands, reliability and availability requirements of the 5G networks. This paper presents a brief overview of the DC technology considering the inter-generations coupling and discusses some challenges involving Radio Resource Management (RRM) in such scenario.

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The Dual Connectivity (DC) technology has gained a lot of momentum in the LTE Release 12 as a means to enhance the per-user throughput and provide mobility robustness. Some studies in the literature have discussed the interworking between the LTE and the air interface of the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) in a DC scenario. That integration may provide some benefits to meet the high throughput, reliability and availability requirements of the 5G networks. This work firstly presents a brief overview of the DC technology considering the integration between 4G e 5G. Then, we highlight some open issues and challenges for future investigation involving Radio Resource Management (RRM) in such a scenario, which includes: (i) user-cell association, (ii) interaction between base stations and (iii) resource allocation. After that, we propose an extension of a utility-based resource allocation algorithm for DC scenarios. Finally, a performance evaluation is conducted in multi-Radio Access Technology (RAT) LTE-NR scenarios considering the bearer split configuration of the DC technology, where the gains provided by the proposed algorithm are demonstrated.

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This paper proposes a new media access control (MAC) protocol for in-vehicle power line communications (PLC). Specifically, the proposed protocol is based on the HomePlug Green PHY (HomePlug GP) which is a modern PLC protocol standard for Smart Grid applications on the Home Area Network [1], however, it has been found that current HomePlug protocols would not cope with the strict timing requirements of in-vehicle communication systems. This paper suggests improvements and modifications to enhance the real-time MAC performance of HomePlug GP in an in-vehicle network through additional priority levels and reduced message length. Simulation results based on the open source network simulator OMNeT++ are provided to show advantages of the proposed protocol.