Abstract
Recently, to address the astonishing capacity requirement of 5G, researchers are investigating the possibility of combining different technologies with ultra-dense networks (UDNs). However, the ultra-dense deployment of small cells in the coverage area of conventional macrocells known as UDNs introduces new technical challenges such as severe interference, unfairness in radio resource sharing, unnecessary handover, a significant increase in energy consumption, and degraded quality-of-service (QoS). To overcome these challenges and achieve the performance requirements in 5G, there is a need to combine UDNs with other 5G enabling technologies and then, design intelligent management techniques for better performance of the overall networks. Hence, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on different generations of wireless networks, 5G new radio (NR) standards, 5G enabling technologies and the importance of combining UDNs with other 5G technologies. Also, we present an extensive overview of the recent advances and research challenges in intelligent management techniques and backhaul solutions in the last five years for the combination of UDNs and other enabling technologies that offers the visions of 5G. We summarise the mathematical tools widely exploited in solving these problems and the performance metrics used to evaluate the intelligent management algorithms. Moreover, we classify various intelligent management algorithms according to the adopted enabling technologies, benefits, challenges addressed, mathematical tools and performance metrics used. Finally, we summarise the open research challenges, provide design guidelines and potential research directions for the development of intelligent management techniques and backhaul solutions for the combination of UDNs and other 5G technologies.
Highlights
The mobile traffic on traditional cellular networks is experiencing explosive growth and the demand for mobile data continues to increase in an exceeding manner as a result of the emergence of smart-phones, tablets, laptops, as well as wearable devices with powerful multimedia facilities and recently introduced applications [1], [2]
The contributions of this paper with respect to the existing surveys are summarised below: (i) We present a comprehensive study of the different generations of wireless networks, 5G standards released by 3GPP in Release 15, state-of-the-art 5G enabling technologies
There are several technical challenges, which must be addressed in order to make the combination of ultra-dense networks (UDNs) and other enabling technologies viable to have a positive impact on the end users in terms of improving the EE, spectrum efficiency (SE), fairness and QoS performance
Summary
The mobile traffic on traditional cellular networks is experiencing explosive growth and the demand for mobile data continues to increase in an exceeding manner as a result of the emergence of smart-phones, tablets, laptops, as well as wearable devices with powerful multimedia facilities and recently introduced applications [1], [2]. The unprecedented rise in mobile data traffic results in ever increasing carbon footprint and energy consumption in mobile communication industry. HetNets have the capability to improve network coverage and enhance spatial radio resource reuse, allowing end users to achieve lower energy consumption with higher data rates while maintaining an uninterrupted connectivity and seamless mobility of cellular networks [17], [18]. The NR is a new air interface, which has been designed to support (i) time-division duplex (TDD) and frequency-division duplex (FDD) at carrier frequencies below and above 6GHz, (ii) massive MIMO, and (iii) scalable numerology [21], [22]
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