Challenges and Trends in the Design of a New Air Interface

The wide variety of envisioned data services and the requirements for transparent operation across different technologies, adaptivity to varying network conditions and quality of service (QoS) constraints introduce a number of challenges in the design of future generation systems and the specification of a new air interface, such as efficiency in the utilization of spectrum, dynamic resource allocation and interference management. Air interfaces will likely be reconfigurable, based on frequency domain transmission and reception methods, and adaptively selecting the uplink and downlink modulation and multiple access scheme that is most appropriate for the channel, interference, traffic and cost constraints. In this paper the challenges in the design of a new air interface are analyzed, a number of enabling technologies, such as smart antennas and relay-based systems, that help address these challenges, are presented, and critical parameters and open issues are discussed