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 3rd 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.