Current cellular networks offer a bottleneck for :
- Latency reduction
- Bandwidth Limitations in traditional wireless spectrum
Increase in demand of data traffic motivated the need to deploy small cells in addition to macro cell deployment.
However traditional Cellular network are base station (BS) centric. Therefore more research is focused on ways to design user centric cellular network. Keep in mind user is not the ultimate authority in wireless network BUT is expected to participate in the following areas.
- Storage
- Relaying
- Content Delivery
- Computation within the network
Future networks such as 5G are expected to connect diverse nodes in close proximity.
Small cell, micro cell, pico cell and femto cell deployment already takes place in existing networks. However these heterogeneous networks (HetNet) ultra dense deployment results in different challenges such as:
- Interference
- Overhead challenges in Control Plane
- Overhead challenges in User Plane
- Switch from age-old omindirectional antennas to sectorized and directional (energy focused) antennas
- Etc.
In order to overcome these challenges, it will require major changes in current network architecture.
The major work areas related to 5G network architecture are listed below.
The table is taken from, M. Agiwal, A. Roy and N. Saxena, "Next Generation 5G Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey," in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 1617-1655, thirdquarter 2016.