Radio access network coordination framework toward 5G mobile wireless networks

This paper presents a framework to coordinate the operation of radio nodes for the future fifth generation (5G) mobile wireless networks. Based on software-defined operation, we introduce entities of the control plane and interaction among them in this framework. The framework brings a number of benefits. It adapts radio coordination to network and traffic dynamics, enables flexible, on-demand radio node optimization, and reduces coordination overhead in bandwidth, energy and processing power. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, a network deployment scenario is simulated. The results show that our framework could significantly improve the performance in terms of quality of experience, computational complexity, and energy efficiency.