5G: Towards energy-efficient, low-latency and high-reliable communications networks

In the past few decades, wireless communications have been evolved from GSM system (2G) to LTE-A networks (4G) with the major interest focusing on the throughput related criteria. 5G communication networks, however, extend to a 3-D performance metric cube based on throughput, number of links and delay simultaneously. Moreover, 5G networks confronts a wider range of future applications, including person-to-person, person-to-machine, or even machine-to-machine types. To deal with all the above cases and challenges, we start from the investigation of most popular 5G scenarios and identify the requirements on the energy efficiency, reliability and delay. Detailed technologies are surveyed and discussed thereafter, to achieve critical requirements and facilitate the fundamental tradeoffs among 3-D performance criteria. Through this study, we hope to shed some lights on the novel 5G communication system design, and further pave the way towards energy efficient, low latency and high reliable communication networks.