Optimal radio access for fully packet-switching 5G networks

In the following decades, traffic volumes and the number of devices are projected to increase a ten to thousand-fold. Unfortunately, existing cellular networks adopting closed-loop communications impose too large spectrum overheads, which lead to an unacceptably low spectrum efficiency and unaffordable traffic burdens. To support the extremely challenging and unavoidable massive data exchanges in 2020 and beyond, we fundamentally re-consider an efficient scheme of the fully packet-switching radio access, that is, open-loop communications. To eliminate the concerns on the capabilities of enhancing the spectrum efficiency and reliability to support multimedia transmissions via open-loop communications, in this paper, we develop the optimum transmission repetition scheme to maximize the resource utilization while providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Our results confirm the efficiency, effectiveness, and practicability of the fully packet-switching radio access as compared with existing closed-loop communications, which suggest a revolutionary system design as the foundations for the fifth generation (5G) networks.