Device-centric radio access virtualization for 5G networks

In this paper, we introduce a virtualized device-centric radio access architecture for future fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. Radio access networks (RAN)s have traditionally relied on Voronoi tessellations of cells, created by a careful deployment of access nodes, to enable spatial frequency reuse over those cells. With the trend firmly set to decouple the control- and user-planes for next-generation 5G mobile networks, we foresee radio access technology breaking away from the concept of cells and embracing a virtualized device-centric architecture. The aim for this paradigm shift is to meet the stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements of densely populated networks irrespective of users´ physical proximity to the access nodes. Focusing on downlink user-plane (U-plane) virtualization, this paper proposes a device-centric hyper-transceiver (HT) design that capitalizes on group-to-group (G2G) communications between virtual multipoint transmission and reception nodes and proactively optimizes both sets of virtual nodes via dynamic point selection (DPS) enabled by cloud-RAN (CRAN) architecture and semi-static network-assisted receiver cooperation enabled by device-to-device (D2D) short-range communications, respectively. Using a full-fledged event-based system level simulator compliant with the 3^rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long-term evolution advanced (LTE-Adv) specifications, our results show that the proposed virtualized U-plane architecture provides more than 50% average throughput and 200% coverage gains over LTE-A Release 11 baseline under some typical simulation scenarios.