Wearable Communications in 5G: Challenges and Enabling Technologies

As wearable devices become more ingrained in our daily lives, traditional communication networks primarily designed for human being-oriented applications are facing tremendous challenges. The upcoming 5G wireless system aims to support unprecedented high capacity, low latency, and massive connectivity. In this article, we evaluate key challenges in wearable communications. A cloud/edge communication architecture that integrates the cloud radio access network, software defined network, device to device communications, and cloud/edge technologies is presented. Computation offloading enabled by this multi-layer communications architecture can offload computation-excessive and latency-stringent applications to nearby devices through device to device communications or to nearby edge nodes through cellular or other wireless technologies. Critical issues faced by wearable communications such as short battery life, limited computing capability, and stringent latency can be greatly alleviated by this cloud/edge architecture. Together with the presented architecture, current transmission and networking technologies, including non-orthogonal multiple access, mobile edge computing, and energy harvesting, can greatly enhance the performance of wearable communication in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, latency, and connectivity.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazin

Energy sustainable paradigms and methods for future mobile networks: A survey

In this survey, we discuss the role of energy in the design of future mobile networks and, in particular, we advocate and elaborate on the use of energy harvesting (EH) hardware as a means to decrease the environmental footprint of 5G technology. To take full advantage of the harvested (renewable) energy, while still meeting the quality of service required by dense 5G deployments, suitable management techniques are here reviewed, highlighting the open issues that are still to be solved to provide eco-friendly and cost-effective mobile architectures. Several solutions have recently been proposed to tackle capacity, coverage and efficiency problems, including: C-RAN, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and fog computing, among others. However, these are not explicitly tailored to increase the energy efficiency of networks featuring renewable energy sources, and have the following limitations: (i) their energy savings are in many cases still insufficient and (ii) they do not consider network elements possessing energy harvesting capabilities. In this paper, we systematically review existing energy sustainable paradigms and methods to address points (i) and (ii), discussing how these can be exploited to obtain highly efficient, energy self-sufficient and high capacity networks. Several open issues have emerged from our review, ranging from the need for accurate energy, transmission and consumption models, to the lack of accurate data traffic profiles, to the use of power transfer, energy cooperation and energy trading techniques. These challenges are here discussed along with some research directions to follow for achieving sustainable 5G systems.Comment: Accepted by Elsevier Computer Communications, 21 pages, 9 figure

Insights on Significant Implication on Research Approach for Enhancing 5G Network System

With the exponential growth of mobile users, there is a massive growth of data as well as novel services to support such data management. However, the existing 4G network is absolutely not meant for catering up such higher demands of bandwidth utilization as well as servicing massive users with similar Quality of service. Such problems are claimed to be effectively addressed by the adoption of 5G networking system. Although the characteristics of 5G networking are theoretically sound, still it is under the roof of the research. Therefore, this paper presents a discussion about the conventional approach as well as an approach using cognitive radio network towards addressing the frequently identified problems of energy, resource allocation, and spectral efficiency. The study collects the existing, recent researches in the domain of 5G communications from various publications. Different from existing review work, the paper also contributes towards identifying the core research findings as well as a significant research gap towards improving the communication in the 5G network system

Softwarization in Future Mobile Networks and Energy Efficient Networks

The data growth generated by pervasive mobile devices and the Internet of Things at the network edge (i.e., closer to mobile users), couple with the demand for ultra-low latency, requires high computation resources which are not available at the end-user device. This demands a new network design paradigm in order to handle user demands. As a remedy, a new MN network design paradigm has emerged, called Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), to enable low-latency and location-aware data processing at the network edge. MEC is based on network function virtualization (NFV) technology, where mobile network functions (NFs) that formerly existed in the evolved packet core (EPC) are moved to the access network [i.e., they are deployed on local cloud platforms in proximity to the base stations (BSs)]. In order to reap the full benefits of the virtualized infrastructure, the NFV technology shall be combined with intelligent mechanisms for handling network resources. Despite the potential benefits presented by MEC, energy consumption is a challenge due to the foreseen dense deployment of BSs empowered with computation capabilities. In the effort to build greener 5G mobile network (MN), we advocate the integration of energy harvesting (EH) into future edge systems