Abstract
The need for massive content delivery is a consolidated trend in mobile communications, and will even increase for next years. Moreover, while 4G maturity and evolution is driven by video contents, next generation (5G) networks will be dominated by heterogeneous data and additional massive diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT). The current network architecture is not sufficient to cope with such traffic, which is heterogeneous in terms of latency and QoS requirements, and variable in space and time. This paper proposes architectural advances to endow the network with the necessary flexibility helping to adapt to these varying traffic needs by providing content and communication services where and when actually needed. Our functional hardware/software (HW/SW) architecture aims at influencing future system standardization and leverage the benefits of some key 5G networking enablers described in the paper. Preliminary results demonstrate the potential of these key technologies to support the evolution toward content-centric and context-aware 5G systems.
Highlights
Current mobile networks, from 2G to recent LTEAdvanced systems, have been designed and deployed with a connection-centric mindset, and static coverage and capacity
Mobile operators have been constrained by the inflexibility of their Radio Access Network (RAN) equipment, limiting the communication and computation capabilities as well as their reconfigurability and flexibility
The years will witness a dramatic increase of Machine-to-machine (M2M) connections [2] due to the progressive introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) traffic and services, that will be dominated by several new vertical business segments [3]
Summary
From 2G to recent LTEAdvanced systems, have been designed and deployed with a connection-centric mindset, and static coverage and capacity. We propose significant architectural advances for the evolution toward context and content-centric networks, with the explicit aim to influence future 5G systems We argue that this evolution should capitalize on the availability of reconfigurable radio platforms for the Radio Access Network (RAN) and take advantage of virtualization technologies, such as Cloud-RAN and the standardized Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework [4], including virtual RAN (vRAN). The key enablers for the proposed architecture are : 1) context-aware reconfigurable radio platforms, where a flexible, efficient and reconfigurable HW/SW adapts the access network characteristics based on data and context information; 2) content-centric resource allocation strategies, especially implemented in C-RAN/vRAN environments, whereby intelligent baseband (BB) processing within vRAN exploits the presence of information related to the aggregation point of several base stations; These enablers can be realized by exploiting radio network information gathering through MEC framework and APIs (possibly co-located with the same virtualized infrastructure hosting vRAN and other virtualized technologies), where context information from the RAN can be provided to user level applications or other services for network performance and Quality of Experience (QoE) improvements.
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