5G and future wireless Internet: Challenges and emerging technologies

Abstract

Wireless devices are becoming more diverse with not just over 6 billion wireless phones but also possibly a much larger number of sensors, machines contributing to machine to machine communication, and practical everything in the so called Internet of Things (IoT). With an anticipated growth in several orders of magnitude of the number of these devices by year 2020, more dense radio networks are emerging. Both data and signaling from mobile devices are expected to grow exponentially over the next five or more years. The cellular networks serving cellular phones and mobile devices globally have employed centralized control with different network functions arranged in a hierarchy. On the other hand, the Internet which is originally built for fixed users is making perhaps the biggest changes to serve the wireless users. Meanwhile networks are being transformed with software defined networking as well as network function virtualization and cloudification as the technologies in communication technologies and information technologies are merging. Standards to define 5G technologies are underway.