ABSTRACT
The rapid advances in both mobile and wireless communication technologies and the high-end mobile devices have led to an increase in the number of users and their quality of service expectations. This in turn has led to an exponential increase in the amount of traffic that the network operators need to accommodate within their networks. According to Cisco [1], by 2020 the global IP network will carry 6.4 EB of Internet traffic per day and 21 GB per capita. Therefore, in order to cope with this explosion of broadband data traffic, the network operators will make use of various new solutions and technologies to be integrated in the next generation of mobile networks, for example, 5G networks to increase their network capacity. Some of the promising solutions include the deployment of a complex structure of heterogeneous small cell networks (HetNets) [2] enabling the dynamic cooperation of different radio access technologies (RATs), Wi-Fi, and femtocell opportunistic offloading techniques of the mobile traffic; techniques such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) [3] or massive MIMO [4], that allow for numerous antennas to simultaneously serve a number of users in the same time-frequency resource; cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) [5], which offers a centralized, cooperative, clean, and cloud computing architecture for 5G radio access networks; software-defined networks (SDN) [6]; and network function virtualization (NFV) that could help the mobile operators to reduce their capital expenditure (CAPEX) intensity by transferring their hardware-based network to software- and cloud based solutions.
