Performance evaluation of 5G millimeter-wave cellular access networks using a capacity-based network deployment tool

The next fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication networks comes with a set of new features to satisfy the demand of data-intensive applications: millimeter-wave frequencies, massive antenna arrays, beamforming, dense cells, and so forth. In this paper, we investigate the use of beamforming techniques through various architectures and evaluate the performance of 5G wireless access networks, using a capacity-based network deployment tool. This tool is proposed and applied to a realistic area in Ghent, Belgium, to simulate realistic 5G networks that respond to the instantaneous bit rate required by the active users. The results show that, with beamforming, 5G networks require almost 15% more base stations and 4 times less power to provide more capacity to the users and the same coverage performances, in comparison with the 4G reference network. Moreover, they are 3 times more energy efficient than the 4G network and the hybrid beamforming architecture appears to be a suitable architecture for beamforming to be considered when designing a 5G cellular network

Millimeter-wave Evolution for 5G Cellular Networks

Triggered by the explosion of mobile traffic, 5G (5th Generation) cellular network requires evolution to increase the system rate 1000 times higher than the current systems in 10 years. Motivated by this common problem, there are several studies to integrate mm-wave access into current cellular networks as multi-band heterogeneous networks to exploit the ultra-wideband aspect of the mm-wave band. The authors of this paper have proposed comprehensive architecture of cellular networks with mm-wave access, where mm-wave small cell basestations and a conventional macro basestation are connected to Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) to effectively operate the system by enabling power efficient seamless handover as well as centralized resource control including dynamic cell structuring to match the limited coverage of mm-wave access with high traffic user locations via user-plane/control-plane splitting. In this paper, to prove the effectiveness of the proposed 5G cellular networks with mm-wave access, system level simulation is conducted by introducing an expected future traffic model, a measurement based mm-wave propagation model, and a centralized cell association algorithm by exploiting the C-RAN architecture. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to realize 1000 times higher system rate than the current network in 10 years which is not achieved by the small cells using commonly considered 3.5 GHz band. Furthermore, the paper also gives latest status of mm-wave devices and regulations to show the feasibility of using mm-wave in the 5G systems.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted to be published in IEICE Transactions on Communications. (Mar. 2015